The OTB version 3.20-rc1 is available for testing !

The new features set for this release is a little smaller than usual, since we have been working hard on porting OTB to ITK4. The 3.20 release aims at both preparing the next Monteverdi2 release and to prepare a merge with the all the work done for ITK4 integration.

Still, it comes with some exciting new features :

• Large scale Mean Shift : A new set of applications to run Mean Shift segmentation on arbitrary large rasters called LSMS. LSMS is a segmentation workflow which allows to perform tile-wise segmentation of very large image with theoretical guarantees of getting identical results to those without tiling. You can now get very nice segmentation results without tiling artifacts on arbitrarily large rasters.
• A method for Running the application from XML files. You can now save the state of all the parameters of an application in an XML file and run the application again with the same set of parameters, overriding just the one you want. This functionality was contribute by a new committer to OTB: Mohammed Rashad.
• Support for DEM as GeoTIFF. This was a long overdue feature, asked many times on the mailing list by users : instead of only the SRTM tiles, OTB now supports elevation from any georeferenced GeoTIFF file.

There are more new stuff coming with this release! For more information, please read the complete Release Notes.

Source code can be downloaded here.

You can also obtain the source code using Mercurial:

hg clone http://hg.orfeo-toolbox.org/OTB
cd OTB
hg update -r 3.20-rc1

Feel free to test the release candidate and share your experiences on the mailing list. And if you run into a bug, please file it into our issues tracker.

You can also help to identify other issues by submitting an Experimental build to the dashboard with:

ctest -D Experimental

For more details please see:

http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Set_up_a_nightly

Soon after the release, the work on OTB v4 with the support of ITK v4 will be merged into the main repository, with the aim of releasing OTB4 soon, with the same feature set than OTB 3.20, but based on ITK4. This will include some API breakages that may require user code updates to compile, but is a necessary evil to continue following ITK evolutions. We will commit on making this big change as painless as possible. In the meantime we wanted to warn the early adopters that the OTB repository trunk will see some big changes soon.

OTB Dev’Team