I am trying to identify, from a set of overlapping buffers, the smallest of their intersections. In other words (easier to understand if you look at the picture below), identify amonst all the intersections which are not containing another, smaller, one (the yellow one, below). I was very excited to find the st_contains() function in R sf a while ago, but it doesn't work as I thought. Here is a working example.
> library(sf)
#creating a set of three points
> dfpt<-cbind.data.frame(X=c(328900,328400,331200),Y=c(403000,403400,402300),ID=1:3)
> sfpt<-st_as_sf(dfpt,coords=c('X','Y'))
# creating buffers of 2000m
> sfb<-st_buffer(sfpt,dist=2000)
# intersecting the buffers
> sfint<-st_intersection(sfb,sfb)
# I am interested in two buffers that are embedded
> sfsel<-subset(sfint,(ID==3&ID.1==1)|(ID==3&ID.1==2)) # whether it's ID or ID.1 might change
#check what it looks like
> plot(st_geometry(sfb),col=NA,border='black')
> plot(st_geometry(sfsel[1,]),col='blue',add=TRUE)
> plot(st_geometry(sfsel[2,]),col='yellow',add=TRUE)
# checking which of the three buffers contain which of the two polygons
> st_contains(sfb,sfsel)
Sparse geometry binary predicate list of length 3, where the predicate was `contains'
1: 2
2: (empty)
3: (empty)
(the expected answer should be 1:2, 2:1,2,3:1,2, which I got in other, similar cases)
# checking if the two polygons contain each other (the first should contain the second!)
> st_contains(sfsel,sfsel)
Sparse geometry binary predicate list of length 2, where the predicate was `contains'
1: 1
2: 2
(the expected answer should be 1:1,2, 2:2)
What happens there? I think it might be the approximation of the polygons arcs that lead R to believe the border of the two polygons (blue and yellow above) are not perfectly aligned. I tried to change the scale (by increasing all distances by 1000) and it did improve the function in some cases, but not many. What can I do?
(For info)
> R.version
_
platform x86_64-w64-mingw32
arch x86_64
os mingw32
system x86_64, mingw32
status
major 3
minor 6.1
year 2019
month 07
day 05
svn rev 76782
language R
version.string R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05)
nickname Action of the Toes