Opticks is a remote sensing application that supports

imagery Imagery is visual symbolism, or figurative language that evokes a mental image or other kinds of sense impressions, especially in a literary work, but also in other activities such as. Imagery in literature can also be instrumental in conveying ...

, video (motion imagery),

synthetic aperture radar Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) is a form of radar that is used to create two-dimensional images or 3D reconstruction, three-dimensional reconstructions of objects, such as landscapes. SAR uses the motion of the radar antenna over a target regi ...

(SAR), multi-spectral, hyper-spectral, and other types of

remote sensing Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an physical object, object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object, in contrast to in situ or on-site observation. The term is applied especially to acquiring inform ...

data. Opticks supports processing remote sensing video in the same manner as it supports imagery, which differentiates it from other remote sensing applications. Opticks was initially developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and other organizations for the

United States Intelligence Community The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a group of separate US federal government, U.S. federal government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work to conduct Intelligence assessment, intelligence activities which ...

. Ball Aerospace open sourced Opticks hoping to increase the demand for remote sensing data and broaden the features available in existing remote sensing software. The Opticks software and its extensions are developed by over twenty different organizations, and over two hundred users are registered users at http://opticks.org. Future planned enhancements include adding the ability to ingest and visualize lidar data, as well as a three-dimensional (3-D) visualization capability. Opticks can also be used as a remote sensing software development framework. Developers can extend Opticks functionality using its plug-in architecture and public application programming interface (API). Opticks is open source, licensed under

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL) 2.1. Opticks was brought into the open source community in Dec 2007 and has a large developer community. For more information, se
the history of Opticks

Desktop Application

Opticks can be used as a standard desktop application. The

vanilla software Vanilla software refers to applications and systems used in their unmodified, original state, as distributed by their vendors. This term is often applied in fields such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-government systems,Clohessy, Trevor; ...

can be used to read and write imagery in several formats and for some basic data analysis as described in th
Opticks Feature Tour
The Opticks community provide
installation packages
for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, Solaris 10 SPARC, and some distributions of

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Software Framework

Opticks can also be used as a software development framework. The Opticks community provides and supports a public SDK which includes a documented

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

as well as several extension tutorials. The Opticks website hosts
variety of extensions
some of which are developed and maintained by the same development team as Opticks.

Community

Opticks has active mailing listsbr>here
and an

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

channel availabl
here
The issue tracker is availabl
here
The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

is availabl
here
Opticks ha
applied
for incubation with the OSGeo foundation. Opticks has participated in both the Google Summer of Code and ESA Summer of Code in Space programs.

Google Summer of Code

GSoC 2010

Opticks participated in GSoC 2010 with two students. The titles of the accepted projects were "Adding Image Stack Support and New Algorithm Plugin for Opticks" and "Speckle removal and edge detection tool for SAR image". Extensions for the projects are availabl
here
an
here

GSoC 2011

Opticks participated in GSoC 2011 under the OSGeo organization with three students. The titles of the accepted projects were "Photography processing tools for Opticks", "Development of a ship detection and classification toolkit for SAR imagery in Opticks", and "Astronomical processing tools for Opticks. Extensions for the projects are availabl
herehere
an
here

GSoC 2012

Visit the current ideas page on th
Opticks Website

European Space Agency Summer of Code in Space

ESA SOCIS 2011

Opticks participated in ESA SOCIS in 2011. The project page can be found on th
Opticks website

ESA SOCIS 2012