geo-index

A Rust crate for packed, static, zero-copy spatial indexes.

Features

• An R-tree and k-d tree written in safe rust.
• Fast. Because of optimizations available by using static indexes, tends to be faster than dynamic implementations like rstar.
• Memory-efficient. The index is fully packed, meaning that all nodes are at full capacity (except for the last node at each tree level). This means the RTree and k-d tree use less memory. And because the index is backed by a single buffer, it exhibits excellent memory locality. For any number of input geometries, the peak memory required both to build the index and to store the index can be pre-computed.
• Multiple R-tree sorting methods. Currently, hilbert and sort-tile-recursive (STR) sorting methods are implemented, but it's extensible to other spatial sorting algorithms, like overlap-minimizing top-down (OMT).
• ABI-stable: the index is contained in a single Vec<u8>, compatible with the flatbush and kdbush JavaScript libraries. Being ABI-stable means that the spatial index can be shared zero-copy between Rust and another program like Python.
• Generic over a set of coordinate types: i8, u8, i16, u16, i32, u32, f32, f64.
• Efficient bulk loading. As a static index, only bulk loading is supported.
• Optional rayon feature for parallelizing part of the sort in the sort-tile-recursive (STRSort) method.

Drawbacks

• Trees are static. After creating the index, items can no longer be added or removed.
• Only two-dimensional data is supported. Can still be used with higher-dimensional input if you're ok with only indexing two of the dimensions.
• Only the set of coordinate types that exist in JavaScript are allowed, to maintain FFI compatibility with the reference JavaScript implementations. This does not and probably will not support other types like u64.
• Queries return positional indexes into the input set, so you must manage your own collections.

Alternatives

• rstar: a dynamic RTree implementation.
• kdtree: a dynamic KDTree implementation.
• kdbush: a port of kdbush but does not strive for FFI-compatibility.
• static_aabb2d_index: a port of flatbush but does not strive for FFI-compatibility.
• static-bushes: a port of flatbush and kdbush but does not strive for FFI-compatibility.

Inspiration

@mourner's amazing flatbush and kdbush libraries are the fastest JavaScript libraries for static R-trees and k-d trees. Part of their appeal in the browser is that they're backed by a single, contiguous buffer, and thus can be moved from the main thread to another thread (a web worker) without any copies.

By porting and expanding on those JavaScript libraries and ensuring that the internal memory layout is exactly maintained, we can bootstrap zero-copy use cases both inside and outside the browser. In-browser use cases can interop between a rust-based WebAssembly module and the upstream JS libraries without copies. Outside-browser use cases can interop between multiple Rust libraries or between Rust and Python without copies.

Why zero-copy?

I'm excited about Rust to speed up Python and JavaScript via compiled extension modules. It's true that you can create Python bindings to a Rust library, have Rust manage the memory, and never need to worry about zero-copy data structures. But when someone else writes a C library that would like to interface with your data, if you don't have an ABI-stable way to share the data, you need to serialize it and they need to deserialize it, which is costly.

For example, in Python, Shapely (and by extension the C library GEOS) is used for most geospatial data storage. But separate Python libraries with C extensions can't use the same GEOS memory because the underlying storage isn't ABI-stable. So there has to be a serde step in between.

GeoArrow solves this problem for geospatial vector data, because it defines a language-independent, ABI-stable memory layout. So you can safely move memory between Python/Rust/C just by exchanging pointer information.

But it's very useful to be able to share large spatial data, declare that the data is already spatially ordered, and share a spatial index, all at no cost.

Currently, this library is used under the hood in geoarrow-rs to speed up boolean operations and spatial joins. But over a medium-term time horizon, I believe that exposing the raw index data will enable exciting FFI use cases that are presently impossible.

Future work

• Nearest-neighbor queries on the R-tree. This is implemented in the original JS version but hasn't been ported yet.
• Geographic queries. Currently all queries are planar.

Benchmarks

This is just one benchmark; I recommend benchmarking with your own data, but this indicates construction is ~2x faster than rstar and search is ~33% faster.

cargo bench --bench rtree

construction (geo-index, hilbert)
                        time:   [80.503 ms 80.891 ms 81.350 ms]
construction (geo-index, STRTree)
                        time:   [115.60 ms 116.52 ms 117.64 ms]
construction (geo-index, hilbert, f64 to f32, including casting)
                        time:   [86.409 ms 86.681 ms 86.984 ms]
construction (geo-index f32)
                        time:   [78.292 ms 78.393 ms 78.514 ms]
construction (rstar bulk)
                        time:   [158.48 ms 159.34 ms 160.29 ms]

search (flatbush)       time:   [115.97 µs 116.41 µs 116.86 µs]
search (flatbush STRTree)
                        time:   [115.85 µs 117.57 µs 118.95 µs]
search (flatbush f32)   time:   [113.04 µs 114.56 µs 115.99 µs]
search (rstar)          time:   [151.53 µs 153.62 µs 155.84 µs]

With the rayon feature, the sorting phase of the STRTree is faster:

cargo bench --bench rtree --features rayon

construction (geo-index, STRTree)
                        time:   [71.825 ms 72.099 ms 72.382 ms]
                        change: [-38.738% -38.125% -37.570%] (p = 0.00 < 0.05)
                        Performance has improved.