A simple and efficient script for converting rasters to polyline shapefiles, comparable to the RasterToPolyline tool in ArcGIS, or r.thin and r.to.vect in GRASS GIS, except it only requires GDAL as a dependency.
It assumes raster values of 1 define lines (ignoring all other values), applies a thinning algorithm to skeletonize the network, and then converts the remaining skeleton to an ESRI shapefile.
The thinning algorithm implemented can be found in the following reference ("Algorithm B"):
"Analysis of Thinning Algorithms Using Mathematical Morphology" by Ben-Kwei Jang and Ronlad T. Chin in Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 12, No. 6, June 1990.
Download this script and make sure it's in your path. Then:
from RasterToLines import RasterToLines as R2L
R2L.RasterToLines("/path/to/my_raster.tif")
That's all there is to it. I hope someone finds this useful.
This script was developed during an internship with OpenTopography, which receives support under the following U.S. National Science Foundation award numbers: 1948997, 1948994, 1948857.