A new OTB Application is born
Gnorasi is a new platform for remote sensing image analysis and processing. It is free (as in freedom) software licensed under GPL2, written in C++ and heavily based on OTB.
Its goal is to provide a knowledge-based environment for advanced image analysis, and an intuitive graphical environment for easily creating custom remote sensing applications.
Gnorasi is also based on Voreen GUI and Qt for graphical representation of processing units called processors and for the creation of advanced processing chains.
Class-level OTB GUI
One can easily think of Gnorasi as a class-level GUI (or a GUI wrapper) for OTB.
Similar to OTB-Applications and Monteverdi packages, Gnorasi demonstrates what can be done with OTB. The difference is that Gnorasi makes available OTB tools at a class level (through processor units wrapping OTB classes) which, when combined through I/O ports, they create simple or advanced processing flows. The goal is to finally wrap all OTB classes in processors and make OTB application creation easy as a LEGO game!
We believe this will mostly help OTB users with less programming experience and make OTB more popular to end users, since C++ knowledge will not be a prerequisite anymore.
Current state of development
At this point Gnorasi is in Alpha development but the application is already usable and can be tested.
Right now (version 0.1.9) the main features of the application are: basic filtering, morphology, egde detection, image segmentation, initial OBIA insfrastructure, radiometry and image math processors.
We are currently working on bringing new processors to the application as well as contribute new algorithms to OTB so that they are available through Gnorasi too.
Source Code and Tutorials
The official mercurial development repository is here
There is a snapshot git repository for GitHub users here. This repository gets updated only during new version releases.
You can also try Gnorasi using our demonstration Live CD or Virtual Machine (password = “user”) prepared using SUSE Studio.
Developers, Testers as well as issue reports are welcome!
We are planning to offer a series of tutorials about using and developing applications in Gnorasi. The introductory video can be found here. More to follow…
Acknowledgments
Gnorasi is currently funded by a joint European and Greek research project under NSRF 2007-2013 program. More details about the project can be found here (currently only in Greek, soon in English too)
The Gnorasi project team:
- Informatics and Telematics Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas
- Remote Sensing Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens
- ALTEC S.A.
- DRAXIS S.A.
Angelos Tzotsos, Gnorasi Developer.