The short story:

• For a few months now we have been working on big changes for OTB (modularization and superbuild) and we will release a new major version 5.0 (coming soon)
• In the meantime, and as there is already lots of new interesting features in OTB since 4.2, we are releasing  today OTB 4.4.

Now the long version:

Modularization (coming soon in OTBv5)

Following the lead of ITK, it will sort the OTB source code into more than 80 consistent modules. There are numerous expected benefits :

• classes in doxygen will be sorted by module
• tests in dashboard will be sorted by modules
• it will be possible to deactivate modules at will to only build what you really need
• contributions will be made very easy through the remote module mechanism.

Impacts on users will be very limited : no changes to application usage, no changes to API. The only small change will relate to linking to OTB libraries, which will now be handled by a CMake variable (${OTB_LIBRARIES}).

Superbuild (coming soon in OTBv5)

This will slightly change the way users build OTB, but hopefully in a good way. In the mean time, we will remove from OTB source code internal third parties, which will now be built by superbuild. Moreover, we will also remove third parties that are not useful anymore, such as Edison, ConfigFile and libKML. The patched SVM library in OTB will be moved to a side project, and if needed OTB will be able to build against this version of libSVM.

These are big changes (with minimal impact on users), so we think they deserve a bump in major version of OTB from 4 to 5 (“give me five”).

Now: OTB 4.4

As there is already a lot of new interesting features which were added to OTB since last release 4.2 (aside from the modularization) and to avoid to delay their availability, we’re releasing a version 4.4 before merging the new code architecture. It is only a “source release” (no binary package) and we’ll move just after to the new modular architecture. This architecture is almost ready but it needs a few weeks of work to check dashboard build, integrate OTB modular and superbuild projects, process remaining actions on third parties and write a lot of documentation to guide through the new code organization (for developers) and build instructions (for users).

What’s new in OTB 4.4?

• A new powerful band math calculator based on MuparserX
• New set of applications for learning/classification of geometries in a shapefile
• bug-fix and code optimization in the BCO interpolator
• Tons of defects fixed thanks to Coverity scan static analyzer (memory leaks, dead code…)

The complete Release Notes can be found here. Source tarballs can be downloaded here.

One more thing…New OTB website!

We are excited to announce our brand-new website at www.orfeo-toolbox.org with a fresh new look, user-friendly navigation and updated information about the Orfeo ToolBox. We hope that you will enjoy it and find more useful information.

Don’t hesitate to give feedback and we encourage you to join the OTB community and mailing list.

OTB Dev Team