NASA VICAR goes open source

[Redrobes]

Link: http://www-mipl.jpl.nasa.gov/vicar_open.html

I am not sure how relevant this is. This seems to be the set of image processing apps that is in use by NASA and JPL for processing the astro pics from the cameras on space craft. First up its UNIX / Linux based. And its all command line too.

Since I like imagemagick and scripting then this is welcome news. Also, I have my own image processing command line app which seems to cover some of these applications and I am quite fond of my app to do a lot of menial tasks that applications with a UI dont like doing. But this set from NASA seems to have been started in the 1960's / 1970's and has been in use right up to date.

I have had a look through the list and theres some interesting apps in there and I have use stuff dead similar to make maps on this site so I think for a few people like say RobA this should be worth looking into.

For example, aside from the usual resizing and color corrections it has 2D FFT, high pass and other filtering that is not normally added to apps. I know Rob added my high pass filter to Gimp some years back. I talk occasionally about spatial filtering and it seems that for sure these apps can do that. I wrote my spatial filter back in the 1990's because I was reading about JPL images doing it - so this must be the original.

Its got some other stuff in there about image registration and auto locating key points on a sequence of images. This sounds cool as I have tried to write something like that and mine is somewhat lame and doesnt work too well. So I think ill check this out.

Anyway - if you want to use image math or do various things with images thats not normally covered with Gimp or Photoshop then this could be a good site to check.

Heres hoping some of you post about your experiences with it....

[waldronate]

It's always nice to see things like this turn up. I like the way that they decided to release it at this time because their user base is rapidly vanishing (according to their own release notes).

Having to download the full source package to read a license file for another project is a tad annoying. Perhaps it was a simple oversight and reuse of another file by mistake.

There's a whole lotta code in that big ball o' mud...