The OSGeo Board is pleased to announce that it has approved the application by the ORFEO Toolbox project to enter the incubation process. Incubation is a stepping stone to becoming a full fledged OSGeo project.
ORFEO Toolbox (OTB) is a project started by CNES (French Space Agency) in 2006 to provide open source tools to process satellite images and extract information.
OTB is distributed as an open source library of image processing algorithms. As the motto of OTB goes, “Orfeo Toolbox is not a black box”, OTB encourages full access to the details of all the algorithms. OTB is based on the medical image processing library ITK and offers particular functionalities for remote sensing image processing in general and for high spatial resolution images in particular. Targeted algorithms for high resolution optical images (Pleiades, SPOT, QuickBird, WorldView, Landsat, Ikonos), hyperspectral sensors (Hyperion) or SAR (TerraSarX, ERS, Palsar) are available.
OTB is distributed under a free software license CeCILL (similar to GPL) to encourage contribution from users and to promote reproducible research. The library is intensively tested on several platforms as Linux, Unix and Windows. Most functionalities are also adapted to process huge images without the need for a supercomputer using streaming and multi-threading as often as possible.
