0.8.0 Release Refactors and Improves Capabilities of MAP-Tk

Motion-imagery Aerial Photogrammetry Toolkit (MAP-Tk) 0.8.0 is a major release that refactors MAP-Tk into two repositories: a new repository called Vital and the existing MAP-Tk repository. Vital contains core framework constructs from MAP-Tk, while the MAP-Tk repository contains plug-ins, tools, the graphical user interface (GUI) application, and structure from motion (SfM) specific helper functions. The split makes it easier to share the core framework of MAP-Tk across the Kitware Image and Video Exploitation and Retrieval (KWIVER) toolkit.

The split also allows MAP-Tk to benefit from features that have been integrated into Vital, which offer better logging and configuration parsing capabilities. More powerful configuration file parsing in Vital has broken the default MAP-Tk configuration files into smaller files. These files reference each other and use namespaces for readability and reuse. The default configuration files are now installed and shared by the GUI and command line tools.  Additionally, example data sets are provided along with example configuration files to demonstrate how to use the software.

Furthermore, as part of the refactoring process, MAP-Tk moved to C++11. Visual Studio 2013 and above is now required on Windows. For additional details and updates to MAP-Tk for version 0.8.0, please read the release notes.

MAP-TK is an open-source collection of libraries and tools for making measurements from aerial video. It is part of the KWIVER toolkit, which tackles challenging image and video analysis problems. For an introduction to KWIVER, please read “KWIVER: An End-to-End Video Analytics Toolkit.”