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As a next step to my previous question "How to calculate where raster a is not equal to raster b?", I now want to sieve (using QGIS -> Raster -> Analysis -> Sieve, or gdal_sieve in the shell) a raster which consists of the values 1 and NaN. The problem is: no matter what parameters I tell gdal_sieve to use, it still returns the original raster, nothing happens.

Pixels I want so sieve out

Above you can see the raster (black pixels) that I want to sieve. Actually, this screenshot was taken immediately after the sieve algorithm ran through. You will find that nothing was sieved.

I guess this is because gdal_sieve cannot handle NaN, so the nearest possible value always is 1 again, if it skips the NaNs.

Because I want to use Zonal Statistics with this raster and some polygons afterwards, it is necessary that this raster consists just of 1 and NaN, because I am interested in the total count of pixels with value 1 in a polygon. If I would use a raster with, say 0 and 1, it would always accumulate these two in my count column.

Does anyone have an idea how to workaround this?

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    Can you post your gdal_sieve command, please. This works for me: gdal_sieve -st 100 -8 -nomask not_sieved.sdat -of "GTIFF" sieved.tif. Everything >100 connected pixel will be excluded with a treshold of 8.
    – Stefan
    Aug 9, 2017 at 12:20
  • This seems to work for me as well, thank you! I have only tried it via the QGIS GUI yet, but because the gdal_sieve command is shown below there, I didn't think that typing it in a bash script would function differently. The -nomask flag seems to make the difference, trying the same parameters via the GUI still does not work.
    – bellackn
    Aug 9, 2017 at 16:12

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The code from Stefans comment works for me:

gdal_sieve.py -st 8 -8 -nomask S2_2015_AOI_Bebaut.tif -of "GTIFF" sieved.tif

The only difference I can see between the GUI version in QGIS and this bash command is the -nomask flag, which cannot be set in QGIS. This seems to do the trick. The official GDAL doc describes its function as follows:

Do not use the default validity mask for the input band (such as nodata, or alpha masks).

I cannot fully understand what this means, but as long as it works, I'm fine with it.

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    I had the same problem, but as of QGIS 3, there is a tick box in the GUI for 'Do not use the default validity mask for the input band'.
    – EcologyTom
    Sep 30, 2021 at 9:40

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