What is OSSIM? What is its Functions?

What is OSSIM? What is its Functions? Where is it located? What it can does? How it works?

Image Source : HSTO.ORG

OSSIM began out of frustration. The core developers worked for ImageLinks Inc. - a venture capital spin off from Harris Corporation. ImageLinks specialized in advanced commercial satellite image processing with a Harris Government Off The Shelf (GOTS) toolkit - the Multi-image Exploitation Tool (MET). MET was developed over period of almost 15 years with an average team of 40 scientists, developers and engineers. It was developed for classified government programs with autonomous image registration, mosaicking, and rigorous sensor modeling as just a few of it many capabilities. To this day it remains one of the leading software tools sets for photogrammetry, remote sensing and image processing.

ImageLinks was granted commercial rights to the MET package and subcontracted a team of Harris software developers to modify it for limited commercial use. Harris and ImageLinks agreed to share developed technology for the next two years. In April of 1996, ImageLinks Inc was formed, Mark Lucas became one of the founders and the Chief Technology Officer.

ImageLinks was started on the premise that scheduled launches of the new commercial imaging satellites coupled with advanced MET technology would provide a successful business model. MET required expensive SGI and Sun workstations and software licenses. The cost per seat was in the range of $25,000. Delays and failures in the commercial imaging business strained the financial resources of the company. The small dedicated development team found it necessary to be in a constant state of crisis development to accomplish difficult projects in a small market. Cash flow was very tight and the company found it difficult to expand due to the expensive hardware and licensing costs. In retrospect, this was a blessing in disguise as it forced the development team to work side by side with the production team and encouraged management to consider alternatives to the standard enterprise solutions.

In 1997 several members of the development team were experimenting with Linux. One day at lunch we wondered if it would be possible to compile the MET software on the Linux platform. It was no believed that it would match the performance of the commercial workstations, but the team thought it might be able to accomplish some functions. A detour to the local computer parts store with a company credit card acquired what was needed to assemble a back room Linux PC. This was a skunk works project - the development team would steal time to build up the system and try to compile the software. Jeff Largent built the hardware and got Linux up and running. Ken Melero and Dave Burken took turns working on the software. Linux and the tools were still evolving and it took a couple of months and Linux software releases before the first version was up and running.

A substantial amount of code, libraries, and tools was involved in building the MET baseline. On an SGI workstation it took almost 12 hours of compiling and linking to assemble the technology. The team was amazed to see the Linux workstation complete the build in just under two hours. Much of this performance increase was due to the rapid advance of PC technology. We were comparing two year old workstations to rapidly evolving commodity PCs with more memory and faster disks. The software performed all of the functions and ran faster on hardware that was one tenth the cost. In a very short time span we converted the ImageLinks production to Linux boxes.

The development team quickly became aware of the advantages of using open source technologies. Expensive development tools were replaced with open source equivalents eliminating licensing costs and headaches. When problems were encountered with open source projects the response was immediate - there were several cases where problems were identified, posted on the project mailing list, and then fixed before the next working day began. Cash flow in the company improved, our cost for production dropped dramatically, and the business eventually became profitable.

After a couple of years the business environment and relationship with Harris Corporation had changed. ImageLinks was limited in its pursuit of government development contracts with the MET software product. The technology exchange between the two companies was not working to either companies satisfaction. ImageLinks could not use the Harris MET package in its government pursuits. ImageLinks decided to replace MET functionality with open source software as a strategic objective.

ImageLinks did not have the financial resources to develop a replacement for the MET capabilities. The team reasoned that they could slowly work towards that goal with an open source approach. Hopefully, others would help, progress would be made - eventually they would get there. When we established the website we were hoping that we wouldn’t embarrass ourselves. The team continued to support open source geospatial technologies and subsequently established remotesensing.org as a portal for those technologies.

The website immediately began to attract a community of interest. Frank Warmerdam, Norman Vine and others brought their software and network of contacts into play. The site quickly hosted Frank’s Geospatial Data Access Library (GDAL), the tiff libraries and geotiff extensions, and a number of other related visualization and mapping projects. Oscar Kramer, Garrett Potts, Dave Burken, and Scott Bortman performed much of the initial software development on the OSSIM baseline. Oscar created much of the sensor modeling and photogrammetry framework, Garrett is the overall system architect, Dave has maintained and improved the overall baseline, and Scottie has focused on Java / Web Mapping services.

ImageLinks continued to make reasonable progress with open technologies as many new capabilities were added to the production system. The remotesensing.org site began to attract attention.

Wired magazine published an online story about remotesensing.org - in typical dotcom fashion, the website and the attention exploded overnight. This triggered calls and interviews from numerous publications. Interested parties in various government agencies contacted us to find out more including the white house science advisor, congressional staffers, and interested parties in the defense and intelligence community. Overnight the remotesensing.org community grew and the number of hosted projects increased. This exposure, and the subsequent technology demonstrations, led to government support of the technology and the continuation of a virtual development team that has survived despite changes in programs and company involvement.

More about OSSIM >> https://trac.osgeo.org/ossim/wiki/history