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ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
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Synthetic Aperture Radar
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
A not totally off-topic question: Can anyone recommend a free data visualization and analysis/plotting package? Something a bit more powerful than gnuplot :)
This is great stuff. I'm planning on starting a PhD course in remote sensing applications with SAR in July, and I'm sure this will be fantastically useful! I was worrying about struggling with proprietary licensing (argh Matlab argh argh)... maybe this will let me avoid it.
Pirate Party UK
No you fool! It's SARS!!! My god, just when I thought I was safe! Damn you europeans, bringing space SARS back with you, you'll kill us all!
Ubuntu is far more ready for the desktop than XP, don't know about Vista as I've never used it. OSX, of course, doesn't have hardware support worth crap.
They use way better stuff than this every week on CSI: Miami.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
This will be the year of the Android desktop!
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
just curious -- do you realize how out of touch with reality you are? I've never known anyone who was batshit crazy, so maybe you could enlighten me.
The software is released free and open source, however you have to pay shipping+handling for the patented white medical mask.
<g>
Um, what? OS X, while I personally rather dislike the "can't install our OS on non-Mac-approved hardware..." ... it DOES support that Mac-approved hardware, it seems.
Vista is usable.
XP is quite usable on the desktop, I've used it for quite a few years now.
Ubuntu is usable too, at least by most people with standard hardware. It's when you buy new hardware (like... a printer) that normal users can really run into problems.
Saying Ubuntu is more ready than XP is ... um... un-informed, IMO. Of course, we may have different definitions of the word ready.
I don't know if the ESA pictured doing this, but in the future, they can just choose from a half-dozen open source projects that far outstrip whatever they were using before. Good show!
My grandma, mom, and sister use it exclusively, and I don't ever have to mess with it, I just run updates every once in a while. You don't have to go out and find drivers for every little thing, 'cause for the most part, stuff Just Works. It does everything they need it to, it does everything I need it to. It's ready for us.
And thanks for posting so that every Slashdotter has to click the link. Those of us that are real ESA investigators that need this package now can't get to the overloaded website...
"Ready for us" (meaning, I suppoce, one to four desktop computers, probably fairly standard bought-from-Dell or something?) does not equal "more ready for the desktop [generic] than XP."
My parents use SuSE 11.0 (will upgrade to 11.1 as soon as I try it out and make sure it works well enough for them), but I usually have to go "fix" things now and then. Something doesn't display, audio isn't playing, the printer didn't work, how do I listen to music (no iTunes), etc.
I don't know exactly what your grandma, mom, and sister use it for, but I know that it doesn't take too many slightly-specialized (i.e., not just "check my e-mail") needs to make it a lot harder to set up for someone.
ESA has been sponsoring FOSS projects for years; I worked on the GPL'ed BEAT software no less than seven years ago that was commissioned by ESA (disclosure: I am no longer with the company that develops it).
See here for more examples of open source software funded by ESA. They are really ahead of the pack in this respect.
I just hope they don't lose this toolbox like they did the last one!
;)
Also, {insert misogynistic comment here}!
I'm not an astronomer, and I am completely at a loss for what all these acronyms actually say, other than speculating that it has something to do with processing radio-telescope data...
I'm glad it was posted here. I was planning to write my own version of this software to read SAR data and now I may not have to.
I wasn't going to click the link, but after reading your post I decided I might as well.
The article points to the Array Systems Computing Inc. site, which seems to be slashdotted.
Information about the tools is also available from the ESA website.
Originally, the LEON SPARC clone was from ESA.
Before that, there was the ESA ERC32 SPARC processor.
Now the project is sponsored by ESA and done by www.gaisler.com
I don't know about Vista, but installing XP on new hardware can be a painful experience.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How can you expect us to complain about the license if you don't tell us if it is GPLv2 or GPLv3? Are you trying to make us RTFA?
Two other very related open source SAR/radar tools: RAT, from the project's website: "Our motivation to start the development of RAT is that modern remote sensing software like Erdas Image or ENVI include only some basic SAR functionality. Advanced algorithms in SAR polarimetry (PolSAR), interferometry (InSAR) and polarimetric interferometry (PolInSAR) have to be implemented by oneself. So we descided to start the development of RAT. RAT should bring modern SAR algorithms to a wider user-base by simplifying in particular the data handling and processing of complex SAR data." ... and Optiks: From the article: "Opticks is used by scientists and analysts within the Department of Defense Intelligence Community to analyze remote sensing data and produce actionable intelligence. Opticks supports Imagery, Motion Imagery, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing data." From the OSGeo post: "A couple of observations: 1. The Contributors Agreement (click on the Contributors Agreement link on the left side of the page) is likely rather intimidating for the average open source contributor. 2. It doesn't use GDAL (although it does have OSSIM as a dependency)."
Animoog.org
Both my folks are using ubuntu on old laptops (an HP and a Dell, both installed with 0 hassles) and have been for a while now. Why? Well at the start they wanted vindoze (both licences somewhere in the void...) but I wasn't going to search the web for a crack for them, and they didn't want to pay. So I said "well, I can have a system (COMPLETE system, including office suite, etc.) up for you in an hour or so but you probably won't get any viruses with this system, so you have to be sure...". A while passed. My father happened upon an free Canon printer not long ago but after I couldn't get it working via ssh (12,000 kms or so of physical difference), he was happy to go out and buy an HP. He plugged it in and everything just worked. He just wanted a printer that worked with ubuntu. I personally had some random bizarre hardware issue with ubuntu kernel patches (that etch doesn't suffer from) but for all non slashdot readers, it's got to be the current best choice.
"Ready for us" (meaning, I suppoce, one to four desktop computers, probably fairly standard bought-from-Dell or something?) does not equal "more ready for the desktop [generic] than XP."
You missed the point. Ready for use means with Ubuntu 99% of the time you add hardware and it just works. With Windows it works 99% of the time after you get the driver install CD, put it in the computer, attempt to install the drivers, go to the manufacturer's web site download the latest drivers, install those, try and figure out why the AV and Anti-Spyware software has decided it doesn't like the new hardware...
I could go on but you get the point.
Who is John Galt?
Ready for use means with Ubuntu 99% of the time you add hardware and it just works.
Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've had problems with various Linux distros (Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu, RedHat) and various versions (have used SuSE since 10.1, for example) and hardware. I have had very few issues with Windows in that particular department (am NOT saying that Windows is flawless or something stupid like that), especially with the ones you describe, especially with antivirus stuff (aside from Norton doing strange things). So, either I am in the 1% of Linux users and 99% of Windows users, or something else is weird. On Linux, I've even had problems with something as simple as a USB flash drive (I think it had to do with a write cache).
You really should google before spending a lot of time writing software....there are some good open source alternatives out there.
Saying Ubuntu is more ready than XP is ... um... un-informed, IMO. Of course, we may have different definitions of the word ready.
Ready to get hacking on that printer problem!
R rocks. Nothing like a Turing complete plotting package. The learning curve is a bit steep, but the tutorial PDFs are a good start.
R graphs are not "pretty". There are no 3D exploding pie charts because they take a very Edward Tufte approach to make sure the graph types maximise understanding. As a result I think they have minimalist beauty.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Opticks is developed in the U.S. and is also open source, uses the QT library and C++ and is certified for use under Windows and Solaris. It could be compiled for Linux and/or OSX by anyone determined enough to get it compiled. When I last examined the source code, it's build system was focused around Visual C++.
Opticks lists compatibility for reading SAR data and it would be interesting to see what it took to read from the mentioned sensors. It is fully capable of dealing with multiple image or motion typed analysis techniques and formats.
Opticks is available at https://opticks.ballforge.net/ and is released under the LGPL 2.1.
Another possibility in the line of open source software is the orfeo toolbox
sponsored by the French Space Agency (CNES). Have a look at http://smsc.cnes.fr/PLEIADES/lien3_vm.htm or or the blog at http://blog.orfeo-toolbox.org/
Teh intarwebs, a place where men are men, women are men and kids are federal agents. And anon cowards are ESA researchers.
I personally don't give a flying fuck about the ESA but still have to congratulate them for the smart decision.
He didn't say 'any Linux distribution'.
Sadly, I haven't yet found a tool which makes as nice EPS output as MATLAB for the purposes of embedding in my reports. Typically nowadays I do all my work in Octave, then SSH into the lab so that I can run MATLAB and generate EPS from the data...
I do actually need to learn to use R. My fiancee had to learn it for her computational statistics course last year -- that's the only reason I know about it.
Pirate Party UK
That was NASA you insensitive clod!