Shrinking a line to fit within a raster surface?

Question

I have a single polyline feature that extends beyond my raster surface. I would like to shrink this line so that the end-points are within the last pixel at the edges of the raster.

I have tried converting the raster to a polygon and clipping but it sometimes puts the endpoint just outside of the raster in no data land.

Is there a simple method that I could use to intersect/shrink the line? ArcObjects is fine.

Answer 1

I've just sorted out one method of accomplishing this, but it involves a lot of I/O.

1) CON the DEM at a nominal value (e.g. VALUE > -1)

2) Raster to Polygon conversion (no simplification)

3) Clip the line by the new polygon

When I get the end points of the line using Feature to Vertices (both ends), they visually appear right on the boundary of the DEM, but when I run Extract Values to Points the values represent valid numbers, not no data, so it appears that they do fall within the DEM boundary.

I would still like a method that involved less I/O if anyone can enlighten me. I am worried that the values might not fall within the DEM boundary in all possible cases.

EDIT: In order to ensure that the end points fall within the DEM boundary Shrink (Spatial Analyst) can be applied to the conditional raster to remove a single pixel width from the entire raster before converting it to polygon format.

Answer 2

You might try unioning together a bunch of small polygons that represent the cells of the raster, then using that union to intersect your original polyline. To loop through each cell, see code here.

polyline = someLongPolyline
unionpolygon = null
For each cell in raster
    if cell has data
        convert cell to IPolygon
        if !(IRelationalOperator)polygon.Disjoint(polyline)
           if unionPolygon = null
              unionPolygon = polygon
           else
              unionPolygon = (ITopologicalOperator)UnionPolygon).Union
           end if
         end if
    end if
next cell
trimmedPolyline = ((ITopoOp)unionPolygon).Intersect(polyline,esriResult1Dimension