[Gdal-dev] Geographic Transformer

[Frank Warmerdam]

On 10/12/05, Mateusz Łoskot <mateusz at loskot.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've just get announcement about Geographic Transformer by Blue Marble Geog.
> It seems to be a tool my company is looking for, but I'm pushin GDAL to
> use in my company. I'd like to as, what are missing features in GDAL in
> relation to GT?

Mateusz,

Skimming through their "features" page I would say that GT has
advantages with regard to:

 o GUI
 o Collection of ground control points graphically.
 o Some sort of automatical control point collection?
 o Warping "quality control review".
 o Graticule overlay.
 o Cutting images into tiles.

There set of raster formats seems ... modest.  It isn't immediately
obvious to me if they provide options to rescale (float->byte, etc)
data, what set of pixel types are supported, etc.

> It isn't cheap :-) But when I see the features list of GT I'd say there is
> no lack of features in GDAL, besides nice GUI ;)
> Certainly, I have coleagues which don't use console-based tools at all,
> they love GUIs, so it may be the point.

To some degree the OpenEV and it's Export Tool provides quite
a bit of what GT does.  The particular hole I would love to fill in
OpenEV + GDAL is the ability to collect ground control points and
a reprojection/warping GUI in OpenEV.

> This may be a little OT post but I think some opinions may help potential
> GDAL users to see its power.

I don't think it is off topic, and it is interesting to see what commercial
folks like Blue Marble are doing.  They are one of the few that has
attempted to produce a general purpose "geospatial image utility"
application.

I don't forsee GDAL trying to address all the GUI needs addressed
by the GT product, but I would like to see one or a few of the
desktop environments like OpenEV, and QGIS try to handle these
needs.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent