Find and Delete Identical Points in ArcGIS – How to

arcgis-10.0arcgis-desktoparcpybig data

I recently performed Integrate on a merged point feature class in ArcGIS 10.1. I specified "1 meter" XY tolerance for the Integrate command. The resulting point feature appears to be what I want except points that were integrated are now stacked on top of each other, which will be problematic in future processing steps. The attributes for my dataset consist of an OID, Shape, x, y, z. Where x and y = UTM coordinates and z = buffer distance. The command Delete Identical (Data Management) does not appear to work for my dataset (i.e based on Fields: OID, Shape, x, y, z and XY tolerance = 1m) as the output still has stacked points. I am also working with big data–the integrate output has 37 million points.

There is a related thread, titled Remove spatially duplicate features using ModelBuilder, although I would like to open the question up to python solutions too.3

What is the best way to find and delete (spatially) duplicate points?

Is there a better solution to integrating such that the output does not contain overlapping points?

Best Answer

Use just the Shape field as the compare fields in the Delete Identical tool which:

Deletes records in a feature class or table which have identical values in a list of fields. If the field Shape is selected, feature geometries are compared.

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