What's new about OTB?

We are very happy to announce the release of Monteverdi, the integrated application for interactive OTB processing chain generation. A more detailed version of what Monteverdi is can be found here. We are releasing Monteverdi in an early state (it is a beta version), but we had at least 2 reasons to do so:

1. We want to have feedback from the users as soon as possible
2. Christmas is next week

In order for you to give it a try easily we have generated a Windows binary package which can be downloaded from Source Forge. You can also get the source code by going to our Mercurial repository. You will need an up to date OTB source code for Monteverdi to compile (get it from the OTB repository). The exact changesets are these:

http://hg.orfeo-toolbox.org/Monteverdi/rev/720eb44955ad http://hg.orfeo-toolbox.org/OTB/rev/70d872ad992a

Although Chuck Berry did not mention Claudio Monteverdi in his song, he should have done it: Monteverdi rocks!

Recently, after requests from some users of OTB, we added an IRC channel to the way we can communicate: welcome back to the pre-web era. This has been very efficient over last week and enabled significant progress to be made on the Qgis plugin (see here). You can join on irc.freenode.net channel #otb. It is also available through a web interface at http://webchat.freenode.net/

More Web 2.0 and following the current buzzword, OTB is also on twitter as @orfeotoolbox (or through the web at http://twitter.com/orfeotoolbox). The idea here is to help developers get familiar with the main classes of OTB and to feature the most important classes one at a time (the objective is one class every 2-3 days). We know that the number of classes is a bit overwhelming and intimidating so that’s a way to start slowly and find out the most important ones.

If you’re curious to know what you can do with OTB and actually what people do with it, you can have a look at some presentations made this year.

These presentations show some research work using OTB, particularly in the special session on open source at IGARSS in Cape Town in July. The presentations are available here. They cover a wide range of topics, from information extraction (object counting, semantic coding) to learning (with a detailed implementation on Kohonen) and from map updating to GUI designing.

One other presentation done at Foss4g in Sydney in October is more general and provide some insights on the next evolutions of OTB.

If you have more examples of some interesting application, do not hesitate to let us know, we can feature them as well!

With the presentation in Sydney last Wednesday, OTB has been finally presented on the five continents. Here is a map of the official presentations in conferences, courses and meetings:

Here is a map of the OTB world tour.

Of course, the density is much higher in Europe and the users also follow this trend, but people in Australia were already aware of OTB before the presentation. This diversity brings very valuable feedback and help improve the quality: at least we know that OTB is working in the southern hemisphere as well!

On The Beach

After a busy couple of months (June and July) with many new additions to OTB and the OTB special session at IGARSS 2009 in Cape Town (which was a success, more on this in a next post), the OTB team lowers down the activity for holidays.

There will always be somebody around during August, but some of us are already on the beach.

The picture here was received today at OTB’s Think Tank by SMS from a member of the OTB team who wants to remain anonymous …

Good holidays On The Beach!