Pleiades is now in flight since almost one year and its twin Pleiades 1B is going to be launched in few days from Kourou. In the frame of the availability of Pleiades images, the OTB team at CNES recently worked on a set of new tutorials to learn how OTB functionality can help in the manipulation and analysis of Pleiades imagery.

OTB at OGRS 2012

To test these new tutorials, we organized a workshop in the frame of the OGRS conference. This conference aims at exchanging ideas on development and use of open source geospatial software in both research and education. The conference took place in Yverdon-Les-Bains Switzerland at the end of october and it was a great opportunity to see how Open Source initiatives help to the dissemination and the use of geospatial information.

SVM classification map

Data used for the workshop were some Pleiades imagery samples provided by Astrium Geo-Information services and the exercises provide an overview of very last new functionality of the library. The course went from the basic image manipulation, segmentation, pixel and object based classification to stereo elevation from Pleiades images pair. Feedbacks and discussions with people who attended the workshop have been really positive.

Mean-shift segmentation on harbour area

On the technical point of view, the idea of these tutorials was to build up a set of OTB functionalities based exercises that can be easily extended in the future. For this purpose, we used the powerful editing and organizing note tool org-mode. It allows to easily create nice ad hoc PDF or HTML documents and to organize lessons or workshops, thanks to the partial export feature for instance. Another advantage of this new OTB tutorials is that they provides now a simple and modular architecture and we hope to continue to enrich it with new exercises in the future.

Thanks again to the Pleiades project which made this workshop possible.

All the materials for these courses are now available in the OTB documentation repository. Feel free to try it, extend it and do not hesitate to send us feedbacks!

Keep in touch!