The NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) 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.
ASP produces cartographic products, including digital terrain models (DTMs, synonymous with digital elevation models, DEMs), ortho-projected images, 3D models, and bundle-adjusted networks of cameras. These data products are suitable for science analysis, mission planning, and public outreach.
- ASP is free software released under the Apache Software License 2.0.
- Documentation: https://stereopipeline.readthedocs.io
Precompiled binaries (for Linux and macOS) are available for the stable releases
and the current development build. Simply download the appropriate distribution
for your operating system, extract, and run the executables in the bin
subdirectory.
See the NEWS for the most recent additions.
To permanently add the ASP executable subdirectory to your PATH,
you can add the following line to your shell configuration (e.g.,
~/.bashrc), replacing /path/to/StereoPipeline/bin with the location
on your filesystem: export PATH=${PATH}:/path/to/StereoPipeline/bin
ISIS users: Please install the latest USGS ISIS if you would like to process NASA non-terrestrial images. Users wishing to process Earth images, such as Digital Globe, satellites with RPC cameras, or various frame/pinhole cameras do not need to download anything else. If ASP is installed with conda, it will install ISIS in the same environment as well, though it may not be the latest version.
The documentation, in HTML format, is at https://stereopipeline.readthedocs.io.
The documentation includes a gentle introduction to using the Stereo Pipeline, an entry for each tool, and example processing workflows for many supported sensors.
The ReStructured Text source files for the documentation are in the docs subdirectory of the ASP distribution.
All bugs, feature requests, user questions, and general discussion can be posted on the ASP support forum.
We also encourage the posting of issues on the GitHub repo (most such items posted on the forum will typically be converted to an issue there for the developers to work on), as well as pull requests.
ASP was developed within the Autonomous Systems and Robotics area of the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA's Ames Research Center. It leverages the Intelligent Robotics Group's (IRG) extensive experience developing surface reconstruction and tools for planetary exploration (e.g., the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover missions, and rover autonomy). It has also been developed in collaboration with the Adaptive Control and Evolvable Systems (ACES) group, and draws on their experience developing computer vision techniques for autonomous vehicle control systems.
See the list of contributors.
In general, please use this reference for the Ames Stereo Pipeline:
Beyer, Ross A., Oleg Alexandrov, and Scott McMichael. 2018. The Ames Stereo Pipeline: NASA's open source software for deriving and processing terrain data, Earth and Space Science, 5. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EA000409.
If you are using ASP for application to Earth Images, or need a reference which details the quality of the output, then we suggest also referencing:
Shean, D. E., O. Alexandrov, Z. Moratto, B. E. Smith, I. R. Joughin, C. C. Porter, Morin, P. J. 2016. An automated, open-source pipeline for mass production of digital elevation models (DEMs) from very high-resolution commercial stereo satellite imagery. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2016.03.012.
In addition to the recommended citation, we ask that you also cite the DOI for the specific version of ASP that you used for processing. Every new release (and daily build) of ASP will have its own unique DOI, which can be found here.
Additional details for how to cite ASP in your published work can be found in the ASP documentation.
See LICENSE file for the full text of the license that applies to ASP.
Copyright (c) 2009-2024, United States Government as represented by the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. All rights reserved.
ASP is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
This distribution may include some bundled third-party software as a
convenience to the user. This software, located in the thirdparty/
directory of the source code release, is not covered by the
above-mentioned distribution agreement or copyright. Binary releases
distribute third party software in both the bin and lib
directories. See the included documentation for detailed copyright and
license information for any third-party software or check the
THIRDPARTYLICENSES
file. In addition, various pieces of ASP depend on additional
third-party libraries that the user is expected to have installed.