Dear OTB community,

We are pleased to announce that OTB version 7.2.0 has been released!

Ready to use binary packages are available on the package page of the website:

• OTB-7.2.0-Darwin64.run (Mac OS)
• OTB-7.2.0-Linux64.run (Linux)
• OTB-7.2.0-Win32.zip (Windows 32 bits)
• OTB-7.2.0-Win64.zip (Windows 64 bits)

It is also possible to checkout the branch with git:

git clone https://gitlab.orfeo-toolbox.org/orfeotoolbox/otb.git OTB -b release-7.2

The documentation for OTB 7.2.0 can be found here. It is expected to be the last minor version before OTB 8.0. The full changelog can be accessed here. Some changes are worth mentioning:

One new official remote module

The S1TilingSupportApplications remote module has been added to the list of official remote modules, and is available in OTB binary packages! It contains the OTB applications developed for the S1Tiling project.

The S1Tiling project provides an automatic processing chain to generate “Analysis Ready” time series for a very large number of applications. Sentinel-1 data is ortho-rectified on the Sentinel-2 grid to promote joint use of both missions. S1Tiling was developed within the CNES radar service, in collaboration with CESBIO, to generate time series of calibrated, ortho-rectified and filtered Sentinel-1 images on any terrestrial region of the Earth. The tool benefits for the SAR ortho-rectification application from the Orfeo ToolBox. The resulting images are registered to Sentinel-2 optical images, using the
same MGRS geographic reference. One will be able to access Sentinel-1 data
acquired on Sentinel-2 31TCJ or 11SPC tiles.

S1Tiling is currently used for many applications, such as deforestation detection in the Amazon, monitoring of rice crops in Southeast Asia or monitoring of water stocks in India. In addition, this software is accessible as an on-demand processing service on the French PEPS collaborative ground segment, in order to make it easier for users to use.

Four new applications

In the process of integrating this module to the list of official remote modules, two applications were ported to the OTB:

The ResetMargin application which is similar to ExtractROI in the sense it extracts a Region of Interest. However, the region outside of the ROI isn’t trimmed, but set to zero.

The Synthetize application is used to concatenate a list of images of the same size into a single single-channel image, by keeping the first non-null pixel value found in the input list.

Two other applications were added:

SpectralAngleClassification allows the classification of an image using a spectral measure. This application computes a spectral measure on a hyperspectral data cube using a set of reference pixels. The image is then classified by finding for each pixel the index of its closest endmember, i.e. the endmember corresponding to the lowest measurement value. The output classification is labeled from 1 to L, L being the number of endmembers.

PantexTextureExtraction computes a texture-derived built-up presence index (PanTex) from textural characteristics of scalar images. This is a contrast textural measure based on co-occurance.

Thanks to everyone who helped during the release process !

Other news

MAJA is now open source

MAJA is an atmospheric correction and cloud screening software using OTB. On October 1st, its source code was freed, allowing anyone to study and modify its functioning, and make it even better.

Removing OSSIM

As explained in the previous article, the next release (8.0) will bring big changes to the OTB, since the dependency to OSSIM will be removed. This implies that the develop branch is in a transition phase with parts of the toolbox that may not function as expected. The new DEMHandler is now fully functional. The new RPC model will follow soon.