how do I get the “outer mantle” of a polygon shape file? (without joining all the polygons)

Question

I am interested in finding all the vertices of all polygons which are not on the inside the most outer polygoin that can be formed in a shape file: Here is how I get all the vertices:

def __init__(self,shapeFilePath):
    driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('ESRI Shapefile')
    self.LandUses = []
    self.Codes = [] #Store Categories
    self.NPolygons = 1 # number of polygons in layer
    self.dataSource = driver.Open(shapeFilePath, 0)
    self.layer = self.dataSource.GetLayer()
    self.NPolygons = self.layer.GetFeatureCount()
    self.Boundaries = [""]*self.NPolygons   # store vertices of each polygon      
    for polygon in range(self.NPolygons):
        area = self.layer.GetFeature(polygon)
        Name = area.GetField(0)
        Kategorie = area.GetField(1)
        self.LandUses.append(Name)
        self.Codes.append(Kategorie)
        geometry = area.GetGeometryRef()
        boundary_raw = str(geometry.GetBoundary())
        #remove tail and head
        boundary = boundary_raw[12:-1]
        boundary = boundary.split(',')
        #print boundary
        #lenboundary = len(boundary)
        #convert each coordinate from string to float
        for x, point in enumerate(boundary):
            boundary[x] = point.split()
        boundingvertices=np.asarray(boundary, dtype=np.float64)
        self.Boundaries[polygon] = boundingvertices

But now I am stuck with a lot of vertices, and I don't know how to get the "mantle", here is a picture displaying what I need:

Before I go hacking my own solution, I'd like to know if the GDAL Gods have been kind and made something like this already.

Thanks a bunch! Oz

UPDATE: Found something call convex hull ... not sure, but testing...
UPDATE #2: Of course one could just join all the polygons ...

Answer 1

I found a decent solution IMHO using Shapely. I am not limited in the amount of dependencies for that package I am writing (Hence, GDAL, is not my only tool). It also seems that Shapely can be used for many other things in my code.

A quick way to "dissolve" the polygons would be to use Shapely's

from shapely.ops import cascaded_union
...
cascaded_union(polygons)

See the full example of dissolving polygons.