The Ames Stereo Pipeline: NASA's Open Source Software for Deriving and Processing Terrain Data

Abstract

The NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline is a suite of free and open source automated geodesy and stereogrammetry tools designed for processing stereo images captured from satellites (around Earth and other planets), robotic rovers, aerial cameras, and historical images, with and without accurate camera pose information. It produces cartographic products, including digital terrain models, ortho‐projected images, 3‐D models, and bundle‐adjusted networks of cameras. Ames Stereo Pipeline's data products are suitable for science analysis, mission planning, and public outreach.

Crater Statistics on the Dark‐Toned, Mafic Floor Unit in Jezero Crater, Mars

“…The boundary of the unit is also marked by an elevation change, and the surface of the dark‐toned unit is higher than the surrounding terrain. We measured this elevation difference in 410 locations around the edges of the unit using DEMs (digital elevation models) from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment; McEwen et al, ) instrument produced using the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (Beyer et al, ; Shean et al, ). In addition, CTX (Context Camera) (Dickson et al, ; Malin et al, ) images were used to verify the mapping and to identify large craters outside of the area covered by HiRISE.…”

Heterogeneous Changes in Western North American Glaciers Linked to Decadal Variability in Zonal Wind Strength

“…For DEM generation we used two open-source software packages for the mass production of DEMs from satellite stereoscopic imagery: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) (Beyer et al, 2018;Shean et al, 2016) and the Ohio State University's Surface Extraction from TIN (triangulated irregular network)-based Search-space Minimization (SETSM; Noh & Howat, 2015, 2017. We used ASP to generate 15,500 DEMs with 30-m posting from ASTER stereoscopic imagery acquired between 2000 and 2018.…”

Multiview Shape‐From‐Shading for Planetary Images

“…An alternative is to use a bundle adjustment solution before running the sfs program, which explicitly solves for camera adjustments so that matching features in all images correspond to the same ground landmark. The ASP program bundle_adjust (Beyer et al, , ) or the ISIS3 program jigsaw (Edmundson et al, ) are examples of software that perform bundle adjustment solutions. This approach is highly reliable, but it depends on correctly identifying the same feature in multiple images.…”

“…Our SfS implementation is not just an algorithm or research code but released as a usable software program, called sfs, as part of the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (Beyer et al, , ), a collection of open‐source software for stereogrammetry and geodesy, available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/NeoGeographyToolkit/StereoPipeline.…”

“…Our SfS implementation is not just an algorithm or research code but released as a usable software program, called sfs, as part of the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (Beyer et al, 2018a(Beyer et al, , 2018b, a collection of open-source software for stereogrammetry and geodesy, available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/NeoGeographyToolkit/StereoPipeline. The program works with camera models provided by the Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers, version 3 (ISIS3; Geological Survey, U. S., 2018;Sides et al, 2017), which is the standard for NASA planetary missions and other camera models for Earth observing satellites that ASP supports.…”