In the frame of the Methodological Part of the ORFEO Accompaniment Program to prepare, accompany and promote the use and the exploitation of the images derived from Pleiades (PHR) and Cosmo-Skymed (CSK) systems, the French Space Agency (CNES) decided to develop the Orfeo Toolbox (OTB): a set of algorithmic components which allow to capitalize the methodological know how, and therefore use an incremental approach to take profit of the results of the methodological research.
ORFEO Toolbox (OTB) is distributed as an open source library of image processing 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. 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 using streaming and multi-threading as often as possible.
Among other, OTB provides a number of heavily documented functionalities as :
-image access: optimized read/write access for most of remote sensing image formats, meta-data access, visualization;
-filtering: blurring, denoising, enhancement;
-feature extraction: interest points, alignments, lines;
-image segmentation: region growing, watershed, level sets;
-classification: K-means, SVM, Markov random fields;
-change detection.