[OSGeo-Announce] OTB 6.2.0 Released

[Jorge Sanz]

Dear all,

We are pleased to announce that Orfeo ToolBox 6.2.0 is out !

As usual, ready-to-use binary packages
<https://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/download/> are available for Windows, Linux
and Mac OS X:

You can also checkout the source directly with git:

git clone https://git@git.orfeo-toolbox.org/git/otb.git OTB -b release-6.2

We welcome your feedback and requests, and encourage you to join the OTB
community and mailing list
<https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=fr#%21forum/otb-users/join>. If you
think you face a bug, please report it on Mantis.
<https://bugs.orfeo-toolbox.org>

As we made an exception to our 3 months release schedule (OTB 6.0 is now 6
months old), we know that you are all looking forward to updating your
favorite tool. And there is indeed a lot of new things
<https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Requests_for_Changes#OTB-6.2.0>
in this new version. In addition, a total of 47 reported bugs have been
fixed. You can check the Release Notes
<https://git.orfeo-toolbox.org/otb.git/blob/5926aca233ff8a0fb11af1a342a6f5539cd5e376:/RELEASE_NOTES.txt>
.
Better help, doc and logs

Thanks to RFC 91
<https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_Changes-91:_Better_error_messages>,
errors have been made clearer everywhere in OTB. For instance, when OTB 6.0
used to say:

2017 May 16 18:07:49 : Application.logger (CRITICAL) Invalid image
filename blabla.tif.
2017 May 16 18:07:49 : Application.logger (FATAL) The following error
occurred during application execution :
/home/otbval/Dashboard/src/OTB/Modules/Wrappers/ApplicationEngine/include/otbWrapperInputImageParameter.txx:79:
itk::ERROR: InputImageParameter(0x2158710): No input image or filename
detected...

OTB 6.2 now says:

2017-05-16 18:07:49 (FATAL): Cannot open file blabla.tif. The file
does not exist.

RFC 96
<https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_Changes-96:_Long_help_in_otbcli>
takes care of improving the display of help in command-line mode. There is
now a *-help* switch that allows to display the same help as in the
documentation tab of GUI applications, and this switch also allows to get
help for parameters:

$ ./bin/otbcli SampleSelection -help instats sampler vec
 MISSING -instats <string> Input Statistics (mandatory)
 Input file storing statistics (XML format)

-sampler <string> Sampler type [periodic/random] (mandatory, default
value is periodic)
 Type of sampling (periodic, pattern based, random)

MISSING -vec <string> Input vectors (mandatory)
 Input geometries to analyse

Meanwhile, we started a background task for improving the content of the
documentation itself. With a single sprint of one day, we already improved
greatly the documentation of 19 applications, which can are listed in RFC
103
<https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_changes-103:_Improve_OTB_Applications_documentation_%28part_1%29>.
We are planning to continue this work in future releases until all
applications have been screened for documentation improvements.

Other improvements in this section includes the logging for composite
application (RFC 105
<https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_changes-105:_Simplify_logging_of_composite_applications>),
and an explicit open-source licence for the Cookbook (RFC 94
<https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_Changes-94:_CookBook_licensed_under_cc-by-sa>
).
Improvements and refactoring of several applications

We re-factor several applications following discussions during last OTB
User Days: <http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/otb-user-days-2017-recap/>

   -

   KMeansClassification
   <https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_Changes-97:_KMeansClassification_reimplemented>:
   now a composite application of sampling/classification applications which
   use internally the KMeans implementation available in the Shark library
   -

   ExtractROI
   <https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_Changes-99:_Refactor_ExtractROI_application>:
   allow to define different types of ROI (coordinates in latitude/longitude),
   give point of interest and a radius, use a reference vector…
   - All in one LSMS segmentation application
   <https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_changes-106:_All-in-one_LSMS_application>:
   new composite application *LargeScaleMeanShift  *which combines all
   steps of Large Scale Segmentation in one application!
   - Convert
   <https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_changes-107:_Refactor_Convert_application>:
   new RGB mode to select input bands (can be read also automaticcally from
   the metadata)
   - PixelValue
   <https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_changes-109:_Refactor_PixelValue_application>:
   Add new way to input pixel position
   - DownloadSRTMTiles
   <https://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Request_for_changes-115:_Refactoring_of_DownloadSRTMTiles>:
   complete revamp of the application which allows to define tiles area from
   images/vector/list of tiles, better handling of corner cases

Improved build, superbuild, and packages

There is now only one binary packages per platform which includes:

   - All in one: All OTB applications, Monteverdi and all official remote
   modules which  are now packaged in the same archive (no more distinction
   between OTB and OTB-Contrib package)
   - OTB XDK: OTB package contains now headers and development files which
   allows to compile and link your source code with OTB.

Moreover, superbuilds now contains the latest OpenJpeg, Gdal and NetCDF5.
Welcome to Daniel McInerney
We’ve got one new committer to OTB! Daniel is a researcher working for
Coillte Teoranta – the Irish State Forestry Board and a user of OTB for a
long time. His first pull request includes a lot of great improvements in
the documentation.
I encourage anybody interested to get more involved in OTB to join
discussions and become part of the team.
Orfeo ToolBox Graduates OSGeo incubation!
OTB has graduated in July from incubation and is now a full fledged OSGeo
project <http://www.osgeo.org/>!
Graduating incubation includes fulfilling requirements for transparent
community operation code provenance, and general good project operation. It
allows OSGeo to recommend Orfeo ToolBox as example sustainable open source
software, giving users and our community confidence in the project and the
project team. It is a great honor for us to become an official member of
the OSGeo community.
Thanks to everyone who helps during the process.

OTB Dev Team
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