Overview

GSDView is the acronym of Geo-Spatial Data Viewer. Its original purpose was to provide a simple tool for handy visualisation of :term`EO` data and attached ancillary information (from now on metadata). Common imaging SW are not able to display EO products both because of their particular and very specific format and both because EO products are usually very large in term of disk/memory size.

Does exist two editions of GSDView:

• an open source version named GSDView Open Edition that is freely available and provides only very basic features.
• a GSDView Pro Edition [1] that is more complete and provide image analysis tools and also ready to use integration components for image processing tools exploitation. GSDView Pro is currently one of the few SW products that support products of the COSMO SkyMed mission.

See also

Features map for more datails.

Footnotes

[1]	GSDView Pro Edition has been developed by INNOVA under an ASI contract n. I/038/07/0 “ASI-GRID”. Todo check contract citation

Todo

cite paper on VITAE

SAR WorkBench

GSDView Pro have to be considered the GUI component of SAR WorkBench 2 (SWB2), a flexible and extensible framework (currently under development) for multi-mission EO data visualisation, analysis and post-processing.

It is modular and has a plug-in architecture (see Technology) that makes it very flexible.

The main functional areas are:

• the GUI (GSDView Pro)
• Ingestion/data exchange
• QA (Quality Analysis)
• Data processing

All the framework is based on the abstract data model provided by the GDAL library.

Thanks to GDAL and some extensions appositely developed the SWB2 project is able to manage EO products from a large variety of SAR missions: COSMO SkyMed, TerraSAR-X, Radarsat 1/2, ALOS/PALSAR, ERS 1/2, and ENVISAT.

It can also handle optical data such as the ones from ENVISAT/MERIS sensor and ALOS/AVNIR-2.

The desktop application

The SWB framework is deployed as a desktop application hose graphical front-end is GSDView.

The GSDView main window

The viewer has been designed to be extremely user-friendly.

It provides a dataset browser listing the available products, a main visualization area, a metadata viewer and a panel indicating the physical location of the image on a world map (Fig. The GSDView main window).

Once a specific product is selected and visualized, the user can select a specific area of interest of the image and stretch it to further analyse it, as shown in Fig. The GSDView main window, where the section of the SAR image of the Palm islands near Dubai (United Arab Emirates) has been enlarged.

Of course the viewer provides the common set of functionalities such as: - zoom, - stretching (pixels value scaling), - scroll, - pan - displaying multiple datasets opened at the same time (MDI) - modify application settings through an user-friendly GUI - display meta-data of products

Through the GUI interface the user can access the other modules available in SWB.

Further to allowing access to multi-mission data, the ingestion and data exchange sub-system also enables the user to export data into standard graphic formats (GeoTIFF, JPEG, PNG) compatible with wide spread software tools and in formats specific for the main GIS and EO applications.

This is fundamental for the integration of SWB into scientific and production environments.

The Quality analysis plugin includes tools for measurement of IRF parameters such as geometric resolution, PSLR, SSLR, ISLR and IRF shape and tools for radiometric analysis.

The Data processing modules provide a set of command line tools and processors that are specific for SAR data processing.

Base functions include filtering, re-sampling, complex data detection without aliasing and geo-coding.

More advanced functions such as ortho-rectification, co-registration and interferometric processing are planned or available via external tools.

Further than the GDAL library SWB2 also uses the powerful processing library OTB.

Processing tools (command line) are integrated in the GUI application that is able to drive them an also provides simple configuration dialogs for them.

Technology

Todo

Expected contents:

• SWB plugin architecture overview
• technical details about python, qt, scipy etc. (??)
• change the name “Technology”, it seems a bit confusing, maybe better “Software architecture” (MN).

High level SWB2 architecture

Todo

use a better figure

High level SWB2 architecture

GSDView is written in python and Qt4. It is modular and has a simple plug-in architecture.

@TBW

Document summary

Todo

short description of other chapter contents

• I think this section should be placed at the top of the Documentation tree; it should be the first chapter (MN).

@TBW