Tools: The open SAR toolkit

The Open SAR Toolkit – the API for SAR processing

There is a need for higher level processing software of SAR datasets for developers that don’t have deep remote sensing or signal processing backgrounds to still do interesting geospatial analytics. ESA Φ-lab is addressing this issue by working on such a tool with ESA’s SNAP Toolbox under the hood.

Initially, the Open SAR Toolkit (OST) was developed at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) under the SEPAL project (https://github.com/openforis/sepal). It has now been completely re-factored and transferred into a simpler and less-dependency rich python3 version.

OST automates the production of small to large-scale Sentinel-1 time-series and timescan data and therefore lowers the entry barrier for pre-processing of Sentinel-1 data. Jupyter notebooks are developed on top of this core package and should help to get started.
The python package is available on our GitHub page (https://github.com/ESA-PhiLab/OpenSarToolkit) and can be easily installed using the python-3 pip package manger.

Post contributed by Andreas Vollrath.