r.to.vect extracts vectors (aka, "arcs") from a raster file. These arcs may represent linear features (like roads or streams), or may represent area edge features (like political boundaries, or soil mapping units).
r.thin and r.to.vect may create excessive nodes at every junction, and may create small spurs or "dangling lines" during the thinning and vectorization process. These excessive nodes and spurs may be removed using v.clean.
A true vector tracing of the area edges might appear blocky, since the vectors outline the edges of raster data that are stored in rectangular cells. To produce a better-looking vector map, r.to.vect smoothes the corners of the vector data as they are being extracted. At each change in direction (i.e., each corner), the two midpoints of the corner cell (half the cell's height and width) are taken, and the line segment connecting them is used to outline this corner in the resultant vector file. (The cell's cornermost node is ignored.) Because vectors are smoothed by this program, the resulting vector map will not be "true" to the raster map from which it was created. The user should check the resolution of the geographic region (and the original data) to estimate the possible error introduced by smoothing.
r.to.vect extracts only area edges from the named raster input file. If the raster file contains other data (i.e., line edges, or point data) the output may be wrong.
Attributes are ignored for feature=line.
Modified program for smoothed lines:
David Satnik,
Central Washington University
Updated 2001 by Andrea Aime, Modena, Italy
Update
Original r.to.sites, r.line and r.poly merged and updated to 5.7 by Radim Blazek
Last changed: $Date: 2003/10/24 16:13:28 $