Orfeo Toolbox is a library for remote sensing image processing. The project was initiated by the French space agency 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 other sensors.
Purpose
OTB provides:
Image access: read/write access for most remote sensing image formats, meta-data access, visualization
Data access: vector data access, DEM model, lidar data
Filtering: blurring, denoising, enhancement for optical or radar data
Feature extraction: texture computations including Haralick, SFS, Pantex, Edge density, points of interest, alignments, lines, SIFT, SURF
Image segmentation: region growing, watershed, level sets
Visualization: a flexible visualization system, customizable via plugins;
and more.
Languages and interaction with other software
OTB is a C++ library, based on Insight toolkit, a medical image processing library. Bindings are developed for Python 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 such 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 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 was initially distributed under the french Open Source licenseCeCILL and is now available under the Apache 2.0 license.
History
The development started in January 2006 with the first release in July 2006. The development version is publicly accessible.
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. OTB in also use for the development of the operational ground segment for the Venus and the ESA Sentinel-2 missions.
