CNES is proud to announce the release of Orfeo ToolBox 3.12, codename Πλειάδες.

After its sucessful launch on the 17th of December 2011, and while still in its comissing phase, Pleiades is already sending us beautiful images. This new release, and especially the JPEG2000 support part, has been tested against real Pleiades images kindly provided by the comisioning team.

There are exciting new stuff in all corners of the library. Some of the notable changes in this release are:

You can find the source (OTB and Monteverdi) and binary packages (Monteverdi form Mac OS X and Windows) here.

Some of the notable changes in this release are:

• Large JPEG2000 file (Pleiades-like) support and Pleiades metadata handling in OTB (more information here)
• Efficient JPEG2000 visualisation and ROI decompression tools in Monteverdi
• Revamp of otb applications in a generic and scalable framework (more information here) : launch applications from Command-Line, from an auto-generated QT GUI, from python, from within QGis …
• Lots of new algorithms : Dimensionality Reduction (ICA, PCA, MNF, MAF …), change detection (MAD), Hyperspectral Unmixing, elevation map from stereo data, compare segmentation with a ground truth (Hoover) …
• And various bug fixes.

There are a lot more new things coming with this release ! For more information, please read the complete release note available here.

As usual, Release Candidate are made to be tested and stressed, so do not hesitate to give it a try and report whatever you find suspicious on the users list, or directly on the BugTracker.

Also note that a teaser of what can be done with OTB is now available here !

Happy Testing!

Manuel, for the OTB team

This video was generated with the open source software version control visualization tool Gource.

It shows modifications  in : OTB, OTB-Applications, Monteverdi, OTB-Documents, OTB-Qgis-plugins and OTB-Wrapping source code repositories.

This will also allows us to measure the number of users and their typical usage. For all these reasons it would be very kind of you if you could take the Users and Contributors Survey.

It will only take about 10 minutes of your time. We are planning to provide the results in September.

Remember that you are welcome to give feedbacks, comment, contributions at any time through our users and developers mailing list. Do not hesitate to get involved !

Many thanks to all of you for your support,

The OTB development team

CNES is proud to announce the release of Orfeo ToolBox 3.10, codename Feliç aniversari. It coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Orfeo ToolBox library (release 1.0 was done the 06/30 2006!).

Release Candidate: thank you !

We would like to thanks all the users for their great feedback after the Release Candidate announcement : thanks to their work, 9 more bugs have been spotted and fixed between the Release Candidate announcement and today.

Take the survey !

Orfeo ToolBox is all about you ! To celebrate the fifth birthday of the OTB, we would like to collect your feedback : a better knowledge of your usage of Orfeo Toolbox and of your processing needs will  help us to improve the tool. Please take the Users and Contributors Survey, it will only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Even more easy to install

The source packages for OTB (Library 3.10, Applications 3.10, Monteverdi 1.8 and Wrapping 1.6) are available on sourceforge as usual. For our Ubuntu (10.04, 10.10 and 11.04) users the new version is available for update through you favorite package manager software.  OpenSuse and CentOS packages will be available in a few days.

For MS-Windows users, there are also a binary auto-install packages available for Monteverdi, OTB-Applications and OTB-Wrapping! Last, a brand new Apple Disk Image (DMG) is also available for Monteverdi.

All the details related to the installation of these binary packages can be found on the download page.

Powerful new features

There are lots of new features in this release! The list of new main add-ons is available here.

There are exciting new stuffs in all corners of the library. New functionalities include among other things :

1. A new multi-image supervised classification suite in OTB-Applications described here.
2. An application to perform segmentation based on connected components and object based image analysis (see description here)

1. A framework for cartographic database creation and validation based on the fusion of features in the framework of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (see description here)

Documentation for all

The OTB development team also initiated, in addition to the OTB software guide, a guide for OTB-Applications and Monteverdi, dedicated to non-developers. This guide is composed of a brief tour of OTB-Applications and Monteverdi, followed by a set of recipes to perform usual remote sensing tasks with both tools. A first version is available here.

Best regards,

Julien Michel, on behalf of OTB development  team.

CNES is  happy to announce that the Orfeo ToolBox has entered the release candidate stage. The packages for the stable 3.10 release will be available at the end of June. It will coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Orfeo ToolBox library (the release 1.0 was done the 06/30 2006!).

The packages for OTB (Library 3.10, Applications 3.10, Monteverdi 1.8 and Wrapping 1.6) Release Candidate 1 are available here:

• http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/packages/OrfeoToolbox-3.10.0-RC1.tgz
• http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/packages/Orfeo-Applications-3.10.0-RC1.tgz
• http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/packages/Monteverdi-1.8.0-RC1.tgz
• http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/packages/OTB-Wrapping-1.6.0-RC1.tgz

For MS-Windows users, there are also a binary auto-install packages available for Monterverdi (here), OTB-Applications (here) and OTB-Wrapping (here) !

If you feel like it, you can download them and test the install procedure. Any feedback will be warmly welcomed! There are lots of new features in this release! The list of new main add-ons is available here.

There are exciting new stuffs in all corners of the library. New functionnalities include among other things :

• A new multi-image supervised classification suite in OTB-Applications described here.
• An application to perform segmentation based on connected components and object based image analysis (see description here)

• A framework for cartographic database creation and validation based on the fusion of features in the framework of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (see description here)

The Monteverdi application is now composed of 42 modules and there are 42+1 applications in OTB-Applications!

The OTB development team also initiated, in addition to the OTB software guide, a guide for OTB-Applications and Monteverdi, dedicated to non-developers. This guide is composed of a brief tour of OTB-Applications and Monteverdi, followed by a set of recipes to perform usual remote sensing tasks with both tools. A first version is already available here.

Please feel free to send your comments, reviews or contributions!

Best regards,

Manuel GRIZONNET, on behalf of OTB development  team.

the OSGeo Live project has just released the version 4.5 of the OSGeo Live GIS software collection, along with a 25 minute video describing the 42 contributing GeoSpatial Open Source applications.

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software.

The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive.
This is the first release which integrates the Orfeo ToolBox library. OTB projects distributed in OSGeo are :

• OTB library
• OTB
• Applications
• Monteverdi
• The software guide
• All the datasets needed to perform examples in the software guide.

For each software, there are 2 pages on the OSGeo Live site : an Overview (http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/otb_overview.html)  and a Quickstart (http://live.osgeo.org/en/quickstart/otb_quickstart.html)
The OTB-Wrapping package is for now not yet integrated in this release, I hope that it could be done for the next OSGeo live release in August 2011.

You can find more informations about the project here : http://live.osgeo.org

Give it a try!

Manuel

We are also happy to announce that starting 3.8.0, packages are available through online repositories for the 3 last Ubuntu versions as well as for OpenSuse ! These packages include the OTB library, the OTB-Applications and Monteverdi. Java and Python wrapping packages will be available very soon. Our next post will explain how to update your system repositories so as to get the last OTB installed in no time and you can already find details about the procedure on the Download page. For windows users, installers are available for Monteverdi and OTB-Applications and Wrappings. Last novelty, a Monteverdi DMG is available for our Mac users (intel only).

There are numerous improvements to the library :
- Improved local descriptors tools based on ImageFunction :
- Rework FlusserImageFunction and HuImageFunction to output all moments in one pass (FlusserMomentsImageFunction, HuMomentsImageFunction)
- Rework RealMomentsImagefilter and ComplexMomentImageFilter to output a matrix of all moments associated to p, q inferior to a given parameter (ComplexMomentsImageFunction, HuMomentsImageFunction)
- Add image function to compute a vector containing the local mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis (RadiometricMomentsImageFunction)
- Add local histogram image function (LocalHistogramImageFunction)
- Add image function to compute the local Fourier Mellin coefficients (FourierMellinDescriptorsImageFunction)
- Add a class to adapt any image function return types to itk::VariableLengthVector (ImageFunctionAdaptor)
- Add a class to build composite image functions (MetaImageFunction)
- New object detection framework (see also http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Object_detection)
- Add filter to generate negative samples (LabeledSampleLocalizationGenerator)
- Add filter to evaluate an image function on a set of point and generate ListSample (DescriptorsListSampleGenerator)
- Add filter to balance the sample number of different classes in a ListSample by generating new samples from existing ones plus noise (ListSampleToBalancedListSampleFilter, GaussianAdditiveNoiseSampleListFilter)
- Add filter to apply a shift/scale to a ListSample (ShiftScaleSampleListFilter)
- Add filter to detect object from an SVM model and an image function (ObjectDetectionClassifier)
- SVMClassifier: add hyperplanes distances as output
- GDALImageIO: support writing of non-streamable format (JPEG, PNG)
- Support reading vector images of std::complex
- BandMathFilter: add physical and image coordinates variables

Monteverdi 1.8 comes with 3 new modules and 2 modules improvements :
- Monteverdi
- New Polarimetric Synthesis module
- New DEM image extraction / HillShading module: creates an image from a DEM tiles directory, with optional hillshading
- New ColorMapping module: apply a colormap to a mono band image
- Viewer module: add multi input support, with slideshow or transparency mode, add more rendering functions, add splitted/packed layout option
- Vectorization module: new semi-automatic mode based on segmentation results proposals.

Regarding the OTB-Applications package, it has been completely revamped and offers the following new features:
- Object Detection applications (see also http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Object_detection)
- EstimateFeatureStatistics to evaluate descriptors statistics on a set of images
- TrainObjectDetector: generates an SVM model from input images and a vector data
- ObjectDetector: detects points in an image from an SVM model
- Add automatically generated GUI wrappers for OTB processing chains
- Add FLTK wrapper
- Add a generic Qt based widget class
- Add a Qt GUI wrapper based on the generic Qt widget
- Add a Qgis plugin wrapper based on the generic Qt widget

The OTB Software Guide has also been updated and is now 700 pages long.

Also, the otb-developers mailing list announced with the 3.6 release is a great success: we had lots of registrations, with very interesting contributions to the project development. Many thanks to the contributors !

On behalf of the OTB development team, we wish you a merry christmas and an happy new year,

It seems that C++ programming can be cumbersome for some users. Well, OTB allows you to work also in other programming languages as for instance Python. The Pylab Project which gathers numeric and scientific Python packages such as NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib is considered as having the same features as some commercial scientific environments. Some people consider that Pylab is even more powerful than these commercial tools, since you get for free the power of a full featured and general purpose programming language as Python.

Recently I needed to quickly plot the temporal profiles of several pixels coming from temporal image series in order to easily assess the impact of a correction algorithm. I have to admit that my first idea was to generate simple ASCII files with the pixel values and then feed these files to Gnuplot. However, I found a more elegant (at least from my point of view) way to do this.

I use the OTB Python bindings in order to read my images (2 GeoTiff files with 49 bands each). Using the “GetPixel” method, I access the pixels I want to plot. Finally I use pylab to plot 2 temporal profiles (before and after correction). Here goes the code.

import sys

if( len(sys.argv) != 5):
    print("Usage: "+sys.argv[0]+" series1 series2 x0 y0")
    exit()

import itk
import otbImages
import otbIO
import pylab

# Types

ImageType = otbImages.VectorImage[itk.D, 2]
ReaderType = otbIO.ImageFileReader[ImageType]

# Pixel coordinates

index = itk.Index[2]()
index[0] = int(sys.argv[3])
index[1] = int(sys.argv[4])

# Import first series
readerBefore = ReaderType.New()
readerBefore.SetFileName(sys.argv[1])
readerBefore.Update()

pixBefore = readerBefore.GetOutput().GetPixel( index )

# Import second series
readerAfter = ReaderType.New()
readerAfter.SetFileName(sys.argv[2])
readerAfter.Update()

pixAfter = readerAfter.GetOutput().GetPixel( index )

# Chek that both series have the same length

if( pixBefore.GetSize() != pixAfter.GetSize() ):
    print("Series have different lengths")
    exit()

# Plot

vectorBefore = \
 [pixBefore.GetElement(i) for i in range(pixBefore.GetSize())]
vectorAfter = \
 [pixAfter.GetElement(i) for i in range(pixAfter.GetSize())]

pylab.xlabel("Date")
pylab.ylabel("Reflectance")
pylab.plot(vectorBefore, label="Raw")
pylab.plot(vectorAfter, label="Clean")
pylab.legend(loc='upper left', shadow=True)
pylab.show()

And here you can see a result example.

Temporal profiles

Of course, you can imagine to make this script a little bit more interactive in order to choose other pixel coordinates, etc., but I hope you grasp the power of this approach. By using the OTB Python bindings and other freely available open source Python goodies (NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, rpy) you get the user friendly approach of Octave, Scilab and their commercial counterparts plus the power of OTB (which in turn makes available ITK, OSSIM, etc.).

Isn’t it great?

The problem we have now, is that there are so many interesting things in OTB, that we would want them all to be available as Monteverdi modules. Since you can compile Monteverdi with the set of modules of your own choice, the more modules you have, the more chances you have to be able to build a customized Monteverdi which suits your particular needs.

Building a Monteverdi module is really easy when only simple graphical user interface (GUI) interaction is needed. If the only thing you need for a module is select the input data and some parameters, the module creation is really straightforward. You can take as an example the Algebra module, which takes 1 or 2 images as input and applies very simple filters (addition, subtraction, etc.). This module can be used as an example in order to provide most of OTB/ITK image filters as Monteverdi modules.

In some cases, you may want to have a preview of the results to see the influence of a given parameter. One example of this is the Mean Shift module. The source code is more complex and we use the MVC (model, controller, view) design pattern in order to have a nice architecture. However, if you want to have the same kind of module but for other kind offilters, you can start from here and just change the filter in the pipeline.

The OTB development team, would like to have some help in the task of creating new modules for Monteverdi. This help can take several forms: just giving suggestions of modules, porting existing applications to modules or creating new modules.

We have set up a wiki page so you can participate easily.

Thanks!