Isis 3 Documentation

History

A 30 year history of USGS Astrogeology image processing software

Introduction

The cartographic and scientific processing of planetary image data has a long history within the USGS Astrogeology Program. The software used has evolved numerous times to keep up with the steady advances made in computing technology. The following outlines the progression of the software over nearly thirty years:

Dates	Computer	Cartographic Software
1971-1980	PDP-11/DOS-BATCH	Unnamed
1978-1987	PDP-11/RSX-11M	Flagstaff Image Processing System (FIPS)
1985-1994	VAX/VMS	Planetary Image Cartography System (PICS)
1992-Present	UNIX	Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers

The Early Years

Computer Room

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Ella Lee using a DeAnza system to display her work

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In 1971, when the Astrogeology's involvement in the Apollo program ended, many computer personnel transferred to Eros Data Center, transferred to other federal agencies, or took jobs in the private sector. Jim Crawforth and Alex Acosta remained and established a computer group to serve the Flagstaff Field Center. Development began of the unnamed image processing package on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11/20 with 8K bytes of memory, two 2.5 megabyte removable disks, an 800BPI tape drive, a card reader, and a teletype terminal. It ran the DOS/Batch, a single user operating system, and image display was handled on a $80,000 filmwriter from Optronics International Inc.

During the following years, the software migrated to a DEC PDP-11/45 with 256KB of memory and larger 40MB disks the size of washing machines. The operating system of choice was RSX-11M, a multi-user system accessed through VT52 black and white video terminals. Programmers were restricted to developing applications which utilized a maximum of 32KB of memory. Image display was upgraded from film to a DeAnza 512x512 Frame Buffer. This configuration became known as the Flagstaff Image Processing System (FIPS)

The Planetary Image Cartography System

In the early 1980's, DEC announced their new VAX/VMS computers which allowed for virtual addressing. Developers no longer had restrictions on the size of their programs. With this major change in computing environment, the Astrogeology Team selected Eric Eliason to lead the conversion of FIPS to the Planetary Image Cartography System (PICS). The Transportable Application Executive (TAE) was chosen as the user interface and programs were gradually migrated to VAX/VMS. PICS was a popular tool in the planetary community with its ability to process Viking, Voyager, Magellan, Landsat and various other spacecraft imagery.

Grinnell Workstation

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Grinnell System

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VAX 4000

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A Star is Born

In the late 1980's, several major events occurred which significantly changed the future of Astrogeology imaging processing software. The first was our involvement in the Galileo NIMS mission. PICS could handle multi-spectral instruments with two to seven bands, but the burden was on the user to manage each band as a separate file. The hyper-spectral NIMS instrument would have 200-300 bands making management under PICS an impossibility. At this time, a completely new software system was invented. The Integrated System for Imaging Spectrometers (ISIS) came into existence under the guidance of designer Jim Torson and developer Kris Becker. The prototype software was released as Isis 2.0.

Janet Richie uses TAE for her processing work

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A second major event occurred in the early 1990's, the Clementine mission. Literally hundreds of thousands of images would be collected. Unfortunately, PICS operated on VAX/VMS, an aging and expensive computer system. The planetary community often lamented over the $50,000 for a single machine including a display device. At this time, Unix began to make a push into the computing world. Astrogeology made the decision to merge the VAX/VMS versions ISIS and PICS under Unix. The integration of PICS into ISIS was lead by Kay Edwards. The primary Unix platforms supported were SunOS and DEC OSF1. This version is referred to as Isis 2.1.

During the late 1990's, ISIS continued to grow in both number of applications and the supported operating systems. Software to process data from Galileo SSI, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor MOC, Mars Odyssey Themis, and other instruments was added. The software was ported to the Linux operating system as the demand for cheaper computers with "Open Software" increased. TAE was still the user interface but display software ran under X-windows making visual image analysis available directly on the user's desktop. ISIS made huge gains in usage by non-USGS customers, especially with increased focus on cartographic processing. So much so that the Astrogeolgy Team changed the meaning of the acronym to Integrated System for Imagers and Spectrometers.

Current Events

In 2001, Astrogeology recognized the software was approaching an end-of-life cycle. Users constantly asked for TAE to be replaced by a standard Graphical User Interface (GUI). The ISIS development staff were unable to use many powerful debugging tools because they did not function at all on Fortran and had other issues with combined Fortran/C programs. Many of the Open Source APIs were only available in C++ or Java and thus not available for usage. Aging cube file formats would not efficiently support missions with line scan cameras. These and many other reasons led to the decision to modernize ISIS. Led by Jeff Anderson, work began in December 2001 on the conversion of Isis to C++.

**Screenshots of Isis Application GUIs**: In addition to GUIs replacing the outdated TAE interface to Isis, programs will have more meaningful names and there will be more task-specific programs to make using Isis easier and faster
Crop All programs will have dialog boxes for selecting files to process, as shown in this screenshot. `Crop` was called `dsk2dsk` in earlier versions of Isis, one of many programs that have been given more meaningful names in Isis 3.0. 549x500, 65KB	Lowpass `Lowpass` is one of several task-specific programs that were once the `boxfilter` program. 463x522, 75KB	Sharpen `Sharpen` is another processing task that was once acheived through the `boxfilter` program. With large programs like filter broken into several smaller programs, there are few parameters to provide, and the names are more meaningful, making Isis easier to learn and use. 480x430, 65KB

Isis Pedigree

**Summary of Major Versions of Isis**
Version	Description
1.0	Prototype software
2.0	First official release on VAX/VMS
2.1	Ported to Unix
3.0	Rewritten in the C++ programming language for Linux

Document History

Jeff Anderson	2003-03-25	Original document
Kimberly Sides	2003-04-02	Photographs of computer systems, scans of historical photographs
Deborah Lee Soltesz	2003-04-07	Dressed up formatting, embedded images

Isis 3

Isis 2

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