NASA has just released all core VICAR applications as open source, distributing its tools to the international community.
NASA began developing the VICAR (Video Image Communication And Retrieval) tools in 1966 and they were originally built to process multidimensional digital imaging data.
These applications were used by the US space agency to transfer and process images and data from its missions.
So simply saying it's a powerful set of tools wouldn't reflect reality, given that it's been in development for 15 years by an agency staffed by top scientists.
NASA has recently shown that it is moving in the direction of open source, and the tools it has made available today are not the first.
The VICAR collection consists of approximately 350 applications.
But what exactly does VICAR do?
“VICAR, stands for Video Communication Image and Retrieval, and is a general-purpose image processing software system that has been developed since 1966 to process digital imaging data in multidimensional formats. VICAR was primarily developed for processing images from Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s unmanned planetary spacecraft. It is now used for many other applications, such as biomedical image processing, cartography, geology, astronomy, and geological surveying. It is used not only by JPL, but also by various universities, NASA sites, and other scientific/research institutions in the United States and Europe.”
reports the official JPL.
You can find all of these NASA tools on GitHub, where they have been released under the Open Source 1.3 license.
Download the VICAR Github applications
