OTB @ FOSS4G 2019 in Bucarest !

Posted on by Yannick Tanguy

The FOSS4G conference took place in Bucarest, for one week (26th – 31th of August). This event is the right place to meet people from the Open Source geospatial community ! It gathered more than 1000 participants, coming from 114 different countries…

Opening session in the National Theatre

Two days of training sessions

During the first two days, we had the opportunity to follow different workshops and to give a tutorial with Orfeo ToolBox. This “guided tour” is based on Jupyter Notebooks, and explains how to implement a small processing chain, that takes as input Sentinel-2 images to count islands in a wonderful area :).

Learn how to count islands by creating a watermask from a small time series of Sentinel 2 images. And do it right by using OTB properly within a Python script !

We were very pleased that the participants enjoyed our workshop: most of them were beginners with OTB and learned how to use OTB to implement remote sensing processing.

This workshop presents all the basics of OTB applications, as well as the Python API and all the powerful features (pipeline, etc.) to build very efficient processing chain. This tutorial is available on Gitlab (https://gitlab.orfeo-toolbox.org/dyoussef/otb-guided-tour/).

A beautiful view and very inspiring talks!

The rest of the week was dedicated to the conference session (11 parallel tracks!) that took place in the big “Intercontinental Hotel” and also in the National Theatre of Bucarest.

Nice view over the city from the top floor

Various subjects were covered :

  • latest news from all the well known geospatial tools (GDAL, QGIS, GRASS, etc.),
  • lots of talks were about web-mapping technologies,
  • various use-cases from people coming from all over the world (ex : water and biomass monitoring in Sahel) and even an interesting analysis of the fires in Amazonia.

We also gave a talk on Orfeo ToolBox and tried to focus on the different ways to use OTB : Monteverdi, OTB in QGIS, Remote Modules, Python interface, etc. Please let us know if you have any suggestion, ideas on how to improve the use of OTB in your applications!

The full program is available on the website of FOSS4G 2019 and all the video recordings are available here.

This conference was very well organized by OSGeo members and all the local community from Romania. It was a unique chance to meet this very friendly family, explore the world of open source software for geospatial, and discover a very welcoming country…

Last but not least, we enjoyed very good “italian style” ice creams (weather was quite hot in Bucarest : hard to resist 🙂