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US NAVY Sonar/Lidar Editing Software Released To the World

Posted by timothy on from the public-domain-makes-registration-a-temporary-annoyance dept.

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.

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. One way to drum up business... by HaGaRzzz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. here it is without the asshole-y email collecting by SuperBanana · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
  3. Editing LAS files can be a big data application... by linearZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.