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ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jan 05, 2009 03:07 PM
from the other-applications dept.
Software Science
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
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Submission: ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox by phyr (586855)
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  • FINALLY !!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by liquidpele (663430) on Monday January 05 2009, @03:09PM (#26334221) Homepage Journal
    Now that we have what every user needed, Linux is finally ready for the desktop.

      • This will be the year of the Android desktop!

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by CannonballHead (842625)

        Um, what? OS X, while I personally rather dislike the "can't install our OS on non-Mac-approved hardware..." ... it DOES support that Mac-approved hardware, it seems.

        Vista is usable.

        XP is quite usable on the desktop, I've used it for quite a few years now.

        Ubuntu is usable too, at least by most people with standard hardware. It's when you buy new hardware (like... a printer) that normal users can really run into problems.

        Saying Ubuntu is more ready than XP is ... um... un-informed, IMO. Of course, we

        • My grandma, mom, and sister use it exclusively, and I don't ever have to mess with it, I just run updates every once in a while. You don't have to go out and find drivers for every little thing, 'cause for the most part, stuff Just Works. It does everything they need it to, it does everything I need it to. It's ready for us.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by CannonballHead (842625)

            "Ready for us" (meaning, I suppoce, one to four desktop computers, probably fairly standard bought-from-Dell or something?) does not equal "more ready for the desktop [generic] than XP."

            My parents use SuSE 11.0 (will upgrade to 11.1 as soon as I try it out and make sure it works well enough for them), but I usually have to go "fix" things now and then. Something doesn't display, audio isn't playing, the printer didn't work, how do I listen to music (no iTunes), etc.

            I don't know exactly what your grandma,

            • Both my folks are using ubuntu on old laptops (an HP and a Dell, both installed with 0 hassles) and have been for a while now. Why? Well at the start they wanted vindoze (both licences somewhere in the void...) but I wasn't going to search the web for a crack for them, and they didn't want to pay. So I said "well, I can have a system (COMPLETE system, including office suite, etc.) up for you in an hour or so but you probably won't get any viruses with this system, so you have to be sure...". A while passed.

            • "Ready for us" (meaning, I suppoce, one to four desktop computers, probably fairly standard bought-from-Dell or something?) does not equal "more ready for the desktop [generic] than XP."

              You missed the point. Ready for use means with Ubuntu 99% of the time you add hardware and it just works. With Windows it works 99% of the time after you get the driver install CD, put it in the computer, attempt to install the drivers, go to the manufacturer's web site download the latest drivers, install those, try and figure out why the AV and Anti-Spyware software has decided it doesn't like the new hardware...

              I could go on but you get the point.

              • Ready for use means with Ubuntu 99% of the time you add hardware and it just works.

                Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've had problems with various Linux distros (Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu, RedHat) and various versions (have used SuSE since 10.1, for example) and hardware. I have had very few issues with Windows in that particular department (am NOT saying that Windows is flawless or something stupid like that), especially with the ones you describe, especially with antivirus stuff (aside from Norton doing strange things). So, either I am in the 1% of Linux users and 99% of Windows users, or something

            • Ubuntu is far more ready for the desktop than XP

              My parents use SuSE 11.0 [...] I usually have to go "fix" things now and then

              He didn't say 'any Linux distribution'.

        • Re:FINALLY !!! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by pembo13 (770295) on Monday January 05 2009, @04:52PM (#26335765) Homepage
          I don't know about Vista, but installing XP on new hardware can be a painful experience.

        • Saying Ubuntu is more ready than XP is ... um... un-informed, IMO. Of course, we may have different definitions of the word ready.

          Ready to get hacking on that printer problem!

  • SAR (Score:5, Informative)

    by stoolpigeon (454276) * <bittercode@gmail> on Monday January 05 2009, @03:10PM (#26334257) Homepage Journal

    Synthetic Aperture Radar [wikipedia.org]

  • Visualization (Score:4, Interesting)

    by johnny maxwell (1050822) on Monday January 05 2009, @03:23PM (#26334451)

    A not totally off-topic question: Can anyone recommend a free data visualization and analysis/plotting package? Something a bit more powerful than gnuplot :)

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      http://www.opendx.org/

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by PeterBrett (780946)

      R [r-project.org]?

      • R rocks. Nothing like a Turing complete plotting package. The learning curve is a bit steep, but the tutorial PDFs are a good start.

        R graphs are not "pretty". There are no 3D exploding pie charts because they take a very Edward Tufte approach to make sure the graph types maximise understanding. As a result I think they have minimalist beauty.

      • Seconded. Over the last half-decade or so, R has gone from feeble and crashy to absolutely rock-solid. I use it all the time. And the graphical output is generally clean and clear by default. Despite coming from a stats background it is not just for biologists and social scientists, it is equally suitable for hard science plotting tasks. Now, if I could only persuade more of my colleagues to accept it. The will insist on being sucked in by MATLAB and the drug-dealer selling tactics of its sellers.

        • Sadly, I haven't yet found a tool which makes as nice EPS output as MATLAB for the purposes of embedding in my reports. Typically nowadays I do all my work in Octave, then SSH into the lab so that I can run MATLAB and generate EPS from the data...

          I do actually need to learn to use R. My fiancee had to learn it for her computational statistics course last year -- that's the only reason I know about it.

    • In the same vein, does anyone know what happened to SeeSoft?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jd (1658)

      OpenDX [opendx.org] is good. is also popular, leading to some nice packages like MayaVi2. ChomboVis [lbl.gov] is no longer under development but may also prove useful. GGobi [ggobi.org] is another very nice toolkit. For a more mathematical visualization, there's also always Octave [gnu.org].

    • Check grace or xmgrace (successor of xmgr)
    • matplotlib and pylab http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

  • This is great stuff. I'm planning on starting a PhD course in remote sensing applications with SAR in July, and I'm sure this will be fantastically useful! I was worrying about struggling with proprietary licensing (argh Matlab argh argh)... maybe this will let me avoid it.

  • They use way better stuff than this every week on CSI: Miami.
  • The software is released free and open source, however you have to pay shipping+handling for the patented white medical mask.

    <g>
  • To be honest, I find this an interesting turn for a space agency. Releasing this sort of spec allows for the nearly endless genius of the internet to produce hundreds of completely awesome and powerful viewers for this sort of data.

    I don't know if the ESA pictured doing this, but in the future, they can just choose from a half-dozen open source projects that far outstrip whatever they were using before. Good show!

  • ESA has been doing this for years (Score:5, Informative)

    by reddish (646830) on Monday January 05 2009, @04:05PM (#26334989) Homepage

    ESA has been sponsoring FOSS projects for years; I worked on the GPL'ed BEAT [stcorp.nl] software no less than seven years ago that was commissioned by ESA (disclosure: I am no longer with the company that develops it).

    See here [esa.int] for more examples of open source software funded by ESA. They are really ahead of the pack in this respect.

    • Open Hardware also from the ESA (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Originally, the LEON SPARC clone was from ESA.
      Before that, there was the ESA ERC32 SPARC processor.

      Now the project is sponsored by ESA and done by www.gaisler.com

    • Who would have guessed a publicly funded research organisation would contribute knowledge back to the community?
      • It's all too rare in Europe, and in that respect we are positively mediaeval compared to the US. The thinking here is that government organizations should charge as much as they can for specialist products (as opposed to public services intended for everyone), in order to reduce their burden for the taxpayer. On top of that, in some fields we have public-private partnerships where are single private company resells government-created data to the public.

    • Re:ESA has been doing this for years (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jlar (584848) on Monday January 05 2009, @07:25PM (#26337529) Homepage

      Unfortunately ESA has a data policy which is lightyears behind that of NASA. While NASA data are just a click away, ESA data are tied up in red tape.

      At least that was my experience some years ago.

    • Thanks for pointing this out. Actually NEST is based on BEAM [brockmann-consult.de], which is currently in version 4.5 (this tool is the first one referenced on the esa page [esa.int] you linked)

  • I'm not an astronomer, and I am completely at a loss for what all these acronyms actually say, other than speculating that it has something to do with processing radio-telescope data...

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They are all Earth observing satellites using Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR). Satellite sends down a radar pulse, picks up the backscattered returns and processes it into an image. From there analysis can tell you a bunch of things: you can monitor sea ice, detect oil slicks, find ships, monitor vegetation, etc. For a lot of applications SAR is excellent because the pulses go right through clouds and you do not need solar illumination to be able to see.

  • The article points to the Array Systems Computing Inc. [array.ca] site, which seems to be slashdotted.

    Information about the tools is also available from the ESA website. [esa.int]

  • Two other very related open source SAR/radar tools: RAT [slashgeo.org], from the project's website: "Our motivation to start the development of RAT is that modern remote sensing software like Erdas Image or ENVI include only some basic SAR functionality. Advanced algorithms in SAR polarimetry (PolSAR), interferometry (InSAR) and polarimetric interferometry (PolInSAR) have to be implemented by oneself. So we descided to start the development of RAT. RAT should bring modern SAR algorithms to a wider user-base by simplifying

  • Opticks is developed in the U.S. and is also open source, uses the QT library and C++ and is certified for use under Windows and Solaris. It could be compiled for Linux and/or OSX by anyone determined enough to get it compiled. When I last examined the source code, it's build system was focused around Visual C++.

    Opticks lists compatibility for reading SAR data and it would be interesting to see what it took to read from the mentioned sensors. It is fully capable of dealing with multiple image or motion

    • No you fool! It's SARS!!! My god, just when I thought I was safe! Damn you europeans, bringing space SARS back with you, you'll kill us all!

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