OSSIM Report 2009

OSSIM 2009 Year in Review

submitted by Mark Lucas

The OSSIM project has now been up and running over a decade and continues to rapidly evolve.  The focus of the core OSSIM library is on satellite and aerial image processing and advanced photogrammetry.  Functions in the library essentially take what the camera sees and transforms it into a map.  OSSIM is in use in many international ground stations and processing centers.  It is often used as part of larger systems such as Opticks and the Orfeo toolbox.  A number corporations and government agencies have integrated OSSIM into their ground station processing solutions.  RadiantBlue Technologies, SPADAC, SAIC, L3-Communications, the Naval Research Labs, the South African Center for Remote Sensing, and the US Department of Defense are just a few examples.

Figure 1.  A historic profile of the source code in the OSSIM repository

The core developers and contributors to the OSSIM project are typically professional software engineers providing commercial and government solutions and engineering students.  At the end of 2009, there are 9 developers with commit permissions in the repository.  OSSIM successfully graduated from OSGeo incubation this year.

A number of additional libraries, tools, applications, and solutions are included in the OSSIM distribution.  The command line tools are typically used for simple tasks or scripting workflows.  OssimPlanet is an accurate 3D geospatial viewer and collaboration client.  It combines OSSIM and OpenSceneGraph to provide 3D visualization.   ImageLinker is a prototyping / production tool that was originally developed to test the functionality of the OSSIM library.  ImageLinker can construct and manipulate complex "image chains" for complex geospatial products.

As the OSSIM library has matured, the core developers have focused more of their efforts on integrating higher level solutions to government agencies by combining with other open source projects. OMAR is a solution that integrates OSSIM, GDAL, OpenLayers, MapServer, Postgres/Postgis, and GRAILS into a powerful provisioning and processing system for satellite ground stations. The OMAR solution is currently being deployed in various ground stations to rapidly expose and process imagery in archives. At the end of 2009, an OMAR site was established at telascience to support the Haiti relief efforts. Government funding for OMAR development and deployment supports the day to day activities of many of the OSSIM core developers.

The development team is currently looking at the OpenGeo project suite to add a number of new features.