Demonstrates how to read GeoTIFF data using the Java GDAL bindings. Raster data is retrieved for a particular latitude/longitude.
Installing the bindings generally involves building the GDAL library from source with special parameters to enable the bindings. Luckily on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04, installing the libgdal-java package will install .so and .jar files required for the Java bindings. This works well when paied with the gdal-bin package (also installed via aptitude).
Once the .jar file is available, it must be added into the Java Class Path. For this project, that was done by pointing to the .jar in the pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.gdal</groupId>
<artifactId>gdal</artifactId>
<version>3.0.4</version>
<scope>system</scope>
<systemPath>/usr/share/java/gdal.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>
I also experimented with GeoTools and a few other libraries used to read GeoTIFF files. These required much less setup (no bindings to install/configure), but I did run into limitations when reading compressed GeoTIFF files.
Here is a sample project using GeoTools to read a GeoTIFF file: https://github.com/tcallsen/geotiff2java
A blog post that discusses this project in more detail is available here: https://taylor.callsen.me/parsing-geotiff-files-in-java/