NITF IO

This repo shows examples of reading and writing National Image Transmission Format (NITF) files. NITF input and output (IO) is done using the NITRO library. In one example, the NITF image data is written out to a *.png using the OpenCV library. NITRO and OpenCV libraries are included as submodules and are under their own licenses.

NITF Data

NITF data can be obtained from Sensor Data Management Database. Specifically, this code was tested on the WPAFB 2009 dataset.

Docker Container

The examples in this repo can be built in a container. The Dockerfile will build NITRO and OpenCV.

docker build -t dennisfgardner/nitf_io:1.0 .

To build the code in this repo, mount the source and NITFs directories.

docker run -itv ./src:/home/nitf_io/src -v ./nitfs:/home/nitf_io/nitfs dennisfgardner/nitf_io:1.0 /bin/bash

The examples can be build using the following cmake command.

cmake -S ./src -B ./build
cmake --build ./build

Example #1 Print NITF Header Information

print_header <nitf_filepath>

For example,

./build/print_header ./nitfs/WPAFB-21Oct2009/Data/TRAIN/NITF/20091021203206-01000611-VIS.ntf.r4

Example #2 Read Image Segment(s) and Write Out as PNG(s)

This is useful to visualize the image segment data.

write_images <nitf_filepath>

For example,

./build/write_images ./nitfs/WPAFB-21Oct2009/Data/TRAIN/NITF/20091021203206-01000611-VIS.ntf.r4

Example #3 Read In NITF and Write Out Same NITF

This is useful if the initial NITF is compressed and you'd like an uncompressed version.

round_trip <input_nitf_filepath> <output_nitf_filepath>

For example,

./build/round_trip ./nitfs/WPAFB-21Oct2009/Data/TRAIN/NITF/20091021203206-01000611-VIS.ntf.r4 output.ntf

Memory Leak Checking

I used valgrind to check for memory leaks.

apt install valgrind

valgrind --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all --track-origins=yes --verbose ./build/print_header ./nitfs/WPAFB-21Oct2009/Data/TRAIN/NITF/20091021203206-01000611-VIS.ntf.r4

valgrind --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all --track-origins=yes --verbose ./build/write_images ./nitfs/WPAFB-21Oct2009/Data/TRAIN/NITF/20091021203206-01000611-VIS.ntf.r4

valgrind --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all --track-origins=yes --verbose ./build/round_trip ./nitfs/WPAFB-21Oct2009/Data/TRAIN/NITF/20091021203206-01000611-VIS.ntf.r4 output.ntf