Improving the Development Workflow of the SETSM Photogrammetry Software

The Surface Extraction by TIN-based Search-space Minimization (SETSM) software is used to produce digital elevation maps (DEMs) from satellite imagery. SETSM has been used for both the ArcticDEM and REMA projects to produce high-resolution terrain maps for the polar regions. The goal of SETSM is to automatically extract a stereo-photogrammetric DEM from pairs of images without any user-defined or a-priori information and using only the sensor Rational Polynomial Coefficients for geometric constraints. The software is written entirely in C and is only dependent on the libtiff and libgeotiff libraries. The SETSM algorithm constructs a Triangular Irregular Network (TIN) in object-space domain to minimize the necessary search space and it employs the coarse-to-fine and vertical line locus strategies.

In this poster we present some of the challenges and solutions involved in optimization of a code that is also concurrently under active development by domain scientists. We discuss the challenges of using continuous integration to move toward automated testing. We also present methods to improve the maintainability and usability of this code. One example, code modularization allows for the testing of different algorithms and makes concurrent development by computer scientists and photogrammetry experts more manageable.