[GRASSLIST:8424] Thoughts on GRASS and OSSIM

[Ned Horning]

Greetings,

 

Shortly after the Open Source Geospatial Conference in Minneapolis there was
talk of combining some of the capabilities of GRASS and OSSIM. Is that
discussion continuing? Although I have a limited knowledge of these two
projects it seems like a great idea. Wouldn't it be nice to have the
functionality of GRASS, the performance of OSSIM, and the simple user
interface of ImageLinker (or QGIS for that matter)? From Internet searches I
can see there was an effort to put together a GRASS/QT library but I haven't
noticed any recent work on this project. That also sounds like a good idea
to me and I wonder why it didn't get too far. 

 

I remain frustrated with the lack of a decent, reasonably full featured,
easy to use, open source image processing package. I'm frustrated because it
seems like the components are out there but there is a lack of synergy or
something. Is anyone aware of someone working on this? The demand is there -
I hear it all of the time when we give our training courses.

 

To help put things into perspective here are some of my thoughts on GRASS
and OSSIM. It would be helpful to hear what other people think about these
two packages and possibly what could/should be done to improve them to make
them more appealing to a broad user community. This may be a long shot but I
would very much like to start a dialog that would lead to improving existing
or creating a new image processing-focused project. 

 

OSSIM (ImageLinker)

OSSIM is a high performance image processing library and ImageLinker is the
GUI application providing access to the OSSIM libraries. Although
significant progress is apparently being made with the OSSIM libraries there
has been little progress on ImageLinker and associated documentation since
the summer of 2004. ImageLinker can do some task very well such as image
visualization and mosaicing a large number of images but "simple" tasks like
contrast enhancements are cumbersome and image classification is not
supported. A good deal of work needs to go into focusing on ImageLinker
before we could consider using this in our introductory remote sensing
courses. I expect that much of this would not be too difficult but adding
other capabilities such as image classification and vector capabilities
would require more time. 

 

OSSIM has tremendous potential as a high end image processing package but
the key to success within our target audience is to package it in a way so
the user can easily access the necessary functionality. The OSSIM community
is primarily made up of developers although with more of a focus on
ImageLinker or a similar application this would become quite popular within
the user community as well.

 

GRASS

GRASS has, by far, the greatest set of capabilities of the free and open
source geospatial software I have been following. Although the user
interface for GRASS has evolved in recent years the underlying architecture
appears largely unchanged since the original version was released about 20
years ago and it has become outdated. Adding a GUI helps but it is not the
solution. The two biggest complaints I hear about GRASS is that it does not
run well in the Windows environment and it is not user friendly or
intuitive. The show-stopper for most people, if they are able to install it,
is that one needs to read a manual simply to learn how to open an image. 

 

The GRASS community is active and growing but with some fundamental
modifications the program could be made much more accessible and the user
community could quickly increase by a factor of 10 and I view that as a good
thing. At this point it is too cumbersome for us to use in our remote
sensing training courses. Although the functionality is there, most of our
students want to use something that is more intuitive and it needs to run
well on Windows and the other operating systems. Also, the entire "Database"
concept in GRASS is cumbersome for many people and should be optional.
Unless some changes are made I expect GRASS use will continue to be limited
to modelers and diehard image processing users who don't mind investing the
time to learn how to use the program. 

 

That's enough for now. 

 

All the best,

 

Ned

--

Center for Biodiversity and Conservation

American Museum of Natural History

Central Park West @ 79th St

New York, NY 10024

e-mail: horning at amnh.org

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Web site: http://cbc.rs-gis.amnh.org/

 

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