Links:

Open remotesensing sites

• remotesensing.org: This site is dedicated to making Remote Sensing algorithms, code, and technology available to all interested parties. Resources are provided to facilitate communication and development of open source tools. It is hoped that this effort will attract participation from companies, students, professors, and agencies that are involved in remote sensing efforts. Through the combination of our collective efforts all parties will benefit through the development of new capabilities, tools, and advances in this field.

• The Alaska Satellite Facility: The Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) is located in the Geophysical Institute (GI) on the Fairbanks campus of the University of Alaska (UAF). ASF is a satellite-tracking ground station for the acquisition, processing, archiving and distribution of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery and derived products for the science community in cooperation with international flight agencies. Lots of tools, and information on SAR.

Open software sites

• netlib.org: The Netlib repository contains freely available software, documents, and databases of interest to the numerical, scientific computing, and other communities. The collection is automatically worldwide synchronized, to provide reliable and network efficient service to the global community. At this place you can find numerical libraries for many purposes, and if you are clever and don't want to program everything from the beginning, you should have a look.

• The GNU Scientific Library: The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is a collection of routines for numerical computing. The routines are written from scratch by the GSL team in ANSI C, and are meant to present a modern Applications Programming Interface (API) for C programmers, while allowing wrappers to be written for very high level languages.

• freegis.org: Here, links to free GIS tools and geographic data are collected. Many proprietary applications can now be substituted by a free solution. Unfortunately the development for some software sectors have been slightly neglected. We worked with GIS and geographic data for several years and permanently fought with unsatisfactory proprietary tools. Even more problematic for Europe is the availability of geographic data. All over the internet we did not find a site dedicated to freedom concerning GIS and geographic data. Well, now there is one.

• ERS SAR Toolbox: The ERS SAR Toolbox (ERS STBX) is a collection of software tools which has been developed to help the remote sensing community to use ERS SAR data. The purpose of the Toolbox is not to duplicate existing commercial packages, but to complement them with functions dedicated to the handling of ESA ERS SAR products. The Toolbox contains tools to perform functions like: data extraction, quick look generation, calibration and radiometric correction, co-registration and speckle filtering. It can be used on the many platforms (PC, Mac, Sun, etc.) and can be used to handle most ERS SAR products (PRI, SLC, SLCI, etc.) generated within the ESA ERS ground segment and at receiving stations round the world.

• Ellipse SAR Geocoding Software: This software, supplied as an IDL .SAV file, allows the automated ellipsoid correction of an ERS SAR PRI image using a full range doppler solution. Such a solution is more accurate than warping using corner coordinates and is fully automated. The results should be within 25m (2 pixels) of error.