SCPAT is an initialism for Swath Characteristic Profile Analysing Toolbox. It is a freely distributed software for non-commercial usages. It requires a MATLAB program that has its own licensing policy.
SCPAT has been developed for analysing data obtained from swath profiling. It allows calculation and visualisation of imported data via its graphical user interface. Using numerous predefined statistical parameters, creating new user-defined parameters, extracting determined parameters outside of the program are some of the benefits of using the SCPAT.
In addition to the 'non-positional' statistical parameters provided by conventional swath profiling programs, the SCPAT determines two 'positional' parameters, i.e. 'protrusions' and 'depressions'. The non-positional parameters define either a marginal value (such as maximum and minimum) or a generalised one (like mean) along scan-lines. These parameters have no information about the location of the value. In contrast, the positional parameters define local changes across the entire swath area. The 3D characteristic of the positional parameters allows defining different (spatial and distributional) patterns within imported data.