US NAVY Sonar/Lidar Editing Software Released To the World

New submitter PFMABE writes The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) has spent 16 years developing the Pure File Magic Area Based Editor (PFMABE) software suite to edit the huge volumes of lidar and sonar data they collect every year. In accordance with 17 USC 105, copyright protection is not available to any work of the US government. Originally developed to run on RedHat OS with network distributed storage, it has been migrated to Windows 7. This software, and accompanying source code (Win & Linux), has been released to the public domain at pfmabe.software, free for download with registration.

Comments

One way to drum up business...

[HaGaRzzz]

This post was submitted by a company looking to make money by selling training to use the software.

Looks like the official distribution page is http://shoals.sam.usace.army.mil/PFMABE.aspx

Re:One way to drum up business...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can ignore/skip the "registration" part and go directly to the download page at this URL.

https://shoals.sam.usace.army.mil/softwaredownload.aspx

Note that its SSL certificate is expired, but if you're skipping the part where you provide personal info, that's not really a concern.

Re:One way to drum up business...

[dbIII]

It will work if you use a Lenovo machine :)

The SSL web of trust has had trucks drive through it so a lot of people are not bothering to update their certs. Sadly you are one of the few that actually cares enough to point out an expired cert instead of just clicking through.

here it is without the asshole-y email collecting

[SuperBanana]

Not really sure why someone felt entitled to hide all this behind a mailing list subscription for a consulting company's email spam list, so here it is via free magnet download. I only included the "required" dataset in addition to the source and required libraries.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0f76f9cb970aaa105843230c556cda28b7418369&dn=PFMABE&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969

That should paste into most torrent clients, watch for CR/LFs though.

Was it written in Sea ;-)

[siri_kan]

/ducks [ Wait there's another pun here ]

MB-System

[Anonymous Coward]

Interested parties should also check out MB-System; it's GPL and NSF
funded. If you are familiar with GMT mapping tools this will be right
up your alley. Supposidly there's a Windows build using Cygwin, but with
datasets this large why would you want to?

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/r...

It is ainly focused on multibeam bathymetry but it despite the name it does
sidescan sonar processing too. It's not set up for LiDAR but its scripts
for dealing with massive point clouds could be adaptable.

Editing LAS files can be a big data application...

[linearZ]

Editing Lidar data and binning surfaces seems useful to all sorts of things Lidary, not just the underwater world. If this software can handle large data sets than it could be useful in detecting and tagging objects in a terrestrial scan. Scan large areas, add a database, and this becomes an open source "big data" Lidar tool.

If this software can't handle large data sets, then who cares beside Sponge Bob, PhD?

Annoying that this source code has been released in this way. But it is open source as public domain, which mean open season on the code base. If it is worth a damn, I'm sure someone will distribute as a proper open source project soon enough.