An overview of the Neighborhood toolset

Neighborhood tools create output values for each cell location based on the location value and the values identified in a specified neighborhood. The neighborhood can be of two types: moving or search radius.

Moving neighborhoods can either be overlapping or non-overlapping. The Focal Statistics tool employs overlapping neighborhoods to calculate a specified statistic for the cells within a specified neighborhood around each input cell. For example, you may want to find the mean or maximum value in a 3 x 3 neighborhood around every cell in an input raster. The Filter tool is a specific type of focal operation that uses a high- or low-pass filter to accentuate or smooth the data. The non-overlapping neighborhood tool, Block Statistics, allows statistics to be calculated in a specified non-overlapping neighborhood. This tool is particularly useful for changing the resolution of a raster to a coarser cell size. The values assigned to the coarser cells can be based on another calculation, such as the maximum value in the coarser cell as opposed to using the default nearest neighbor interpolation.

Calculating statistics for overlapping and non-overlapping neighborhoods

The search radius tools perform various calculations based on what is within a specified distance from point or linear features. These are the Point Statistics and Line Statistics tools, respectively.

Learn about sample applications for neighborhood analysis

The following table lists the available Neighborhood tools and provides a brief description of each.

Tool	Description
Block Statistics	Partitions the input into non-overlapping blocks and calculates the statistic of the values within each block. The value is assigned to all of the cells in each block in the output.
Filter	Performs either a smoothing (Low pass) or edge-enhancing (High pass) filter on a raster.
Focal Flow	Determines the flow of the values in the input raster within each cell's immediate neighborhood.
Focal Statistics	Calculates for each input cell location a statistic of the values within a specified neighborhood around it.
Line Statistics	Calculates a statistic on the attributes of lines in a circular neighborhood around each output cell.
Point Statistics	Calculates a statistic on the points in a neighborhood around each output cell.

Tools of the Neighborhood toolset