Developer(s) CNES Operating system Type Library | Written in C++ Available in C++, Python, Java, IDL | |
Stable release 5.2 / December 12, 2015 (2015-12-12) | ||
Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) is a library for remote sensing image processing. The project was initiated by the French space agency (CNES) in 2006 and is under heavy development. The software is released under a free licence; a number of contributors outside CNES are taking part in development and integrating into other projects. The goal is to provide potential users of satellite images with all the tools necessary to use these images. The library is originally targeted at high resolution images acquired by the Orfeo constellation: Pleiades satellites and Cosmo-Skymed but also handles a wide variety of sensors.
Contents
- Languages and interaction with other software
- Applications
- Monteverdi version 1 and 2
- License
- History
- Presentations
- References
OTB provides:
The library is intensively tested on several platforms as Linux, Mac OS X and Windows OTB Dashboard. Most functions are also adapted to process huge images (>4GB) using streaming and to take advantages of multicore processor as often as possible.
The library have an extensive documentation for both API (OTB API) and illustrated capabilities in the Software Guide (html version).
Languages and interaction with other software
OTB is a C++ library, based on Insight toolkit (ITK), a medical image processing library.
Bindings are developed for Python and Java and are available as the separate OTB-Wrapping project. A blog post on the orfeo-toolbox blog details an example using the python wrapping
A method to use OTB components within IDL/ENVI has been published.
One of the OTB user defined a procedure to use the library capabilities from MATLAB.
Since late 2009, some modules are developed as processing plugins for QGIS. Modules for classification, segmentation, hill shading have provided. This effort has not been funded so far and relies only on volunteers.
OTB algorithms are now available in QGIS through the processing framework Sextante.
Applications
Additionally to the library, several applications with GUI are distributed. These application enable interactive segmentation, orthorectification, classification, image registration, etc...
Monteverdi (version 1 and 2)
The OTB-Applications package makes available a set of simple software tools which were designed to demonstrates what can be done with OTB. Many users started using these applications for real processing tasks, so we tried to make them more generic, more robust and easy to use. It supports raster and vector data and integrates most of the already existing OTB applications. The architecture takes advantage of the streaming and multi-threading capabilities of the OTB pipeline. It also uses cool features as processing on demand and automagic file format I/O. The application is called Monteverdi, since this is the name of the Orfeo composer. This is also in memory of the great (and once open source) Khoros/Cantata software.
In 2013, Monteverdi software have been revamped to take into account users feedbacks regarding how useful the tool was, but also regarding what should be improved to move toward greater usability and operationnality. Monteverdi concept has been reworked into a brand new software called Monteverdi2, enlightened by this experience.
License
OTB is distributed under a free software license CeCILL (similar and compatible with GPL).
History
The development started in January 2006 with the first release in July 2006. The development version is publicly accessible.
Presentations
As of October 2009, OTB has been presented in major conferences across the five continents
Many of those presentations are publicly available
According to statistics on ohloh, there is a total of 41 contributors and almost 260,000 lines of code (this include many libraries upon which OTB is built).
OTB in also use for the development of the operational ground segment for the Venus (Vegetation & Environment new micro satellite) and the ESA Sentinel-2 missions.