I'm currently working on a project where I have to identify geomorphological features in a digital elevation model. Since the aim is to have a single ArcGIS Toolbox integrating all processing steps in the end, I would like to use Scipy and Scikit-image besides the already provided numpy (version 1.6.1) package in Python (version 2.7) for the image processing.
Installing Scipy and Scikit-image from the precompiled binaries provided by C. Gohlke (many thanks to him for providing this! http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/) is normally a good solution, but not possible in this case, since they were compiled using a newer numpy version.
Upgrading the numpy module of ArcGIS seems not to be an option, because it breaks the arcpy API (reported by ESRI in the webhelp).
I see now two options, but not sure about it at all:
1.) Using another python installation besides the one provided by ArcGIS. The Toolbox is only used to link to external python scripts.
2.) Compiling/building SciPy and Scikit-image from source using the correct modules (extremely complicated, since it has a lot of dependencies, already tried for hours, not successful yet...)
3.) Any other suggestions how to solve this problem?
Thank you!