Ames Stereo Pipeline, NASA's Open Source Automated Stereogrammetry Software

Software Zachary M. Moratto, Michael J. Broxton, Ross A. Beyer, Mike Lundy, and Kyle Husmann, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269-3, Moffett Field, CA, USA, Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, and California Polytechnic State University Introduction There is a large demand for the creation of digital elevation models (DEMs) from stereogrammetry methods. Traditional methods are unfortunately slow and expensive. For example, at the time of this writing there are 1,346 stereo pairs[1] from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), only tens of which have been processed into DEMs. The Ames Stereo Pipeline [2] (ASP) aims to correct this problem by providing an open source suite of fully automated geodesy and stereogrammetry tools designed to process planetary imagery captured from robotic explorers. In particular the ASP has been tuned for processing HiRISE and LROC stereo pairs. The ASP was recently released to the public in October 2009 and is available at http: //ti.arc.nasa.gov/project/ngt/stereo/.