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IDL-based freeware for viewing/matching stereo pairs

2006, August 3 - 14:32 — Robert Herrick

For those of you interested in a generic tool for viewing stereo pairs and manually editing match points, I developed some freeware (if you have IDL) to do that, and it can be downloaded at http://www.gi.alaska.edu/~rherrick/smt/index.html. It works under IDL and there is a users manual and installation guide on the web site. I had an abstract about it at the 2005 LPSC (abs. #1984). The download includes sample image pairs from Magellan, MOC, and Voyager.

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2006, August 7 - 11:34 — Ross A. Beyer

No copyright or license

Thanks for reminding us of this application, Robbie!

However, in looking at the distribution, there is no copyright statement in the code anywhere. The documentation talks about some parts being based off of previous software, a program called Light Table. No mention of its copyright status or the terms in which this Stereo Matching Tool utilizes that software is present. There is a mention of these matters in the Acknowledgements section, but it really isn't sufficient. I'm sure that this is just an oversight and that Robbie will correct all of this information.

In a similar vein, there is no license statement of any kind, so potential users can't really ascertain what they can or can't do with the released code. The documentation in the distribution solicits feedback and fixes, but without a proper license statement (may I suggest any of the many excellent copyleft licenses) users can't really be assured that any of their contributed fixes or additions will be made available to others, or even of their legal right to modify the code in any way (including bug fixes). Please consider placing this software under a free and open source copyleft license. Again, based on the documentation, it sounds like this is what you want to do.

I know that it can be daunting to try and figure out all of this legalese when you just want to distribute some code so that people can use it. However, putting the right copyright and licensing information on that code ensures that everyone will play by the same rules, and that the authors of the work will get their proper credit. Your IT department and university legal department should be able to help you get everything straightened out.

2006, August 15 - 09:38 — Robert Herrick

Will update this in the future

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, and at some point I will attempt to draft a copyleft statement for the code. I can confirm that the code was developed from scratch by me and a contract programmer, so I am free to distribute it as I see fit. I hope that if others make substantive improvements that they also make those available, and I will pass along to the community any changes I receive.

Robert Herrick, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks

2007, May 2 - 17:09 — Robert Herrick

documentation updated with copyleft statement

I have finally updated the users guide and web page for SMT to include a copyleft statement.

Robert Herrick, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks