Tag Archives: Remote Sensing

TuiView

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TuiView is an open source viewer for remote sensing data, named after the New Zealand bird (Tui). It’s primarily for viewing raster data but it will also display vectors. I’ve been using it as my main remote sensing viewer for over a year and I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

tuview_nlcd_alaska

It works on windows, OS X and Linux, if you’re on windows, you can grab an installer from here and you should be good to go (don’t worry about there only being 32 bit installers it’s pretty light on memory).

If you’re on Linux / OS X you binaries are available through conda from binstar.org/osgeo or you can install from source.

To install from source you need to have GDAL, numpy and PyQt installed. I’d recommend installing GDAL from source and making sure you build with python bindings (–with-python). For Linux you can install numpy and PyQt from the package manager. Under OS X, assuming you already have numpy, you need to install Qt4, then install sip and PyQt4. If you want to view vectors you also need turbogdal.

After the prerequisites have been installed you can install tuiview using:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/chchrsc/tuiview tuiview
cd tuiview
sudo python setup.py install

You should then be able to bring up TuiView by typing tuiview in a terminal window. You can load in an image by clicking on the first icon on the left.

TuiView can handle very large (> 50 GB) datasets, very quickly if you build pyramids for the dataset and pre-calculate statistics. You can use gdalcalcstats from gdalutils, or the popimgstats option in RSGISLib

gdalcalcstats image.kea -ignore 0
# or
rsgiscmd --algor imageutils --option popimgstats \
   --image image.kea --ignore 0 \
   --pyramids yes

Note: The rsgiscmd interface is shown here, you could also use XML or the Python bindings.
It’s a good habit to create pyramids and calculate statistics for outputs at the end of your scripts as other programs (such as ArcGIS and ERDAS Imagine) can also use them.

TuiView has lots of options, including the ability to load multiple images in the same or linked windows, and excellent support for raster attribute tables. A comprehensive guide to the functionality is available on the TuiView wiki.