We are happy to announce that Orfeo ToolBox 6.2 is out!

As usual, ready-to-use binary packages are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X:

OTB 6.2

You can also checkout the source directly with git:

git clone https://git@git.orfeo-toolbox.org/git/otb.git OTB -b release-6.2

We welcome your feedback and requests, and encourage you to join the OTB community and mailing list. If you think you face a bug, please report it on Mantis.

As we made an exception to our 3 months release schedule (OTB 6.0 is now 6 months old), we know that you are all looking forward to updating your favorite tool. And there is indeed a lot of new things in this new version. In addition, a total of 47 reported bugs have been fixed. You can check the Release Notes .

Better help, doc and logs

Thanks to RFC 91, errors have been made clearer everywhere in OTB. For instance, when OTB 6.0 used to say:

2017 May 16 18:07:49 : Application.logger (CRITICAL) Invalid image filename blabla.tif.
2017 May 16 18:07:49 : Application.logger (FATAL) The following error occurred during application execution : /home/otbval/Dashboard/src/OTB/Modules/Wrappers/ApplicationEngine/include/otbWrapperInputImageParameter.txx:79:
itk::ERROR: InputImageParameter(0x2158710): No input image or filename detected...

OTB 6.2 now says:

2017-05-16 18:07:49 (FATAL): Cannot open file blabla.tif. The file does not exist.

RFC 96 takes care of improving the display of help in command-line mode. There is now a -help switch that allows to display the same help as in the documentation tab of GUI applications, and this switch also allows to get help for parameters:

$ ./bin/otbcli SampleSelection -help instats sampler vec
 MISSING -instats <string> Input Statistics (mandatory)
 Input file storing statistics (XML format)

-sampler <string> Sampler type [periodic/random] (mandatory, default value is periodic)
 Type of sampling (periodic, pattern based, random)

MISSING -vec <string> Input vectors (mandatory)
 Input geometries to analyse

Meanwhile, we started a background task for improving the content of the documentation itself. With a single sprint of one day, we already improved greatly the documentation of 19 applications, which can are listed in RFC 103. We are planning to continue this work in future releases until all applications have been screened for documentation improvements.

Other improvements in this section includes the logging for composite application (RFC 105), and an explicit open-source licence for the Cookbook (RFC 94).

Improvements and refactoring of several applications

We re-factor several applications following discussions during last OTB User Days:

• KMeansClassification: now a composite application of sampling/classification applications which use internally the KMeans implementation available in the Shark library

• ExtractROI: allow to define different types of ROI (coordinates in latitude/longitude), give point of interest and a radius, use a reference vector…

• All in one LSMS segmentation application: new composite application LargeScaleMeanShift  which combines all steps of Large Scale Segmentation in one application!
• Convert : new RGB mode to select input bands (can be read also automaticcally from the metadata)
• PixelValue: Add new way to input pixel position
• DownloadSRTMTiles: complete revamp of the application which allows to define tiles area from images/vector/list of tiles, better handling of corner cases

Improved build, superbuild, and packages

There is now only one binary packages per platform which includes:

• All in one: All OTB applications, Monteverdi and all official remote modules which  are now packaged in the same archive (no more distinction between OTB and OTB-Contrib package)
• OTB XDK: OTB package contains now headers and development files which allows to compile and link your source code with OTB.

Moreover, superbuilds now contains the latest OpenJpeg, Gdal and NetCDF5.

Welcome to Daniel McInerney