We are very happy to announce the release of OTB 3.18 codename “Seven years of Coding”!

Some of the major changes in this release are:

• OTB meets OpenCV: the architecture of the machine learning framework has been redesigned. It provides a simple and generic interface to create bridges with existing machine learning algorithms implementation. This new framework has been used to include  OpenCV machine learning algorithms. So in addition to LibSVM,  you can now use 8 other algorithms  for your images classification tasks, such as bayesian, k-nearest neighbors, random forests, artificial neural network… All these classifiers can be reached directly from the TrainImagesClassifier and ImageClassifier applications (read this note to learn about migrating to these new applications).
  
• Dempster-Shafer based fusion of classifications: A new method based on Dempster-Shafer theory has been developed to fuse multiple classification maps. This method will take advantage of the per-class strengh and weaknesses of each input classification (estimated from confusion matrices) to produce a robust output map combining the best of each input. It is available as an alternative choice to majority voting fusion in the FusionOfClassifications application.
• Improvement of the StereoFramework application: a whole set of filters has been developed to enhance this application, including line-of-sight intersection, left-right / right-left coherency checking and fusion of several 3D clouds into one raster DSM. The application now allows to input several views of the same scene and build a single raster DSM from them combining the information from all pairs, which is most useful for tri-stereoscopic Pleiades data for instance.
• Access to GDAL overviews and writing of output image subsets throughout the library using the box and resol parameters of the extended filenames.

There are also a great deal of major improvements in the core library (as listed in the release note).

Thanks again to all the contributors for the great work and to all the users for their feedbacks after the release candidate, especially Morgan and Agustin who helped spotting bugs and documentation flaws.

As usual, sources (OTB, Monteverdi, OTB-Wrapping) and binary packages (Monteverdi for Mac OS X and Windows) can be downloaded here. For Linux users, new version will be soon available for update through your favorite package manager software.

We welcome your feedback and request, and encourage you to join the ORFEO community and mailing list.

OTB is not yet “On The Beach” as we’re expecting to release a new beta version of Monteverdi2 in few days with major improvements.

Spoiler alert: Monteverdi 2.0 beta2 screenshot

OTB Dev Team