Introduction¶
Abot BEST¶
The Basic Envisat SAR Toolbox (BEST) is a collection of executable software tools that has been designed to facilitate the use of ESA SAR data. It is able to handle the SAR products obtained from ASAR (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar) and AMI (Active Microwave Instrument) on-board Envisat and ERS 1&2 respectively.
The BEST toolbox includes tools for the:
- Data Import and Quick Look
- Data Export
- Data Conversion
- Statistical
- Re-sampling
- Co-registration
- Support for Interferometry
- Speckle Filtering
- Calibration
For more detail you should refer to the BEST Home Page.
BEST operates according to user-generated parameters files. The software is designed with an optional graphical interface that simplifies specification of the required processing parameters for each tool. The interface does not include a display function.
BEST is available at http://earth.esa.int/services/best
About BESTGUI¶
BESTGUI is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for BEST written in Python and GTK+.
It allows you to easily specify the processing parameters for the various BEST tools and launch the processing from the GUI.
BESTGUI aims to be a replacement of the Tcl/Tk HMI, the default GUI front-end included in the BEST software distribution. It inherits all the interesting features already present in the Tcl/Tk HMI and adds some useful ones:
| a prettier look an feel: | |
|---|---|
| thanks to the GTK+ toolkit and its rich set of widgets BESTGUI has a modern look and feel. | |
| improved menus and toolbars: | |
| BESTGUI has all the menus that the user usually expects (File, Help etc) further than the Tools menu that give access to the BEST tools. It also provides an useful toolbar. | |
| persistent preferences: | |
| like the bestw, the GUI front-end for WindowsTM provided with the BEST software distribution, BESTDUI allows you to set your preferences providing a easy configuration dialog. Preferences are saved in a configuration file in the user home directory. | |
| smart environment handling: | |
| BESTGUI is able to automatically set the three environment variables required by BEST (i.e. BESTHOME, FLAGFILE and the PATH) provided that at least the best executable location or the BESTHOME is known. Similarly to bestw BESTGUI allows to set this parameters using the preferences dialog. | |
| colorized output log: | |
| BESTGUI provides an output log area in which the messages coming from the running BEST instance are reported using different colors for standard and error messages. The output log area automatically pops-up when BEST is launched and can be hidden by the user. | |
| progress bars: | the amount of progress of the task is reported both as number (percentage) and graphically using a progress bar. |
| stop button: | in some cases the execution of a task can take a long time. BESTGUI provides a Stop Button that allows the user to stop the running task from the GUI if necessary. |
| an improved AoI dialog: | |
| some of the BEST tools allow the user to specify the AoI i.e. the Area of Interest of the image to be processed. Like bestw, BESTGUI provides an improved dialog to make this settings. | |
| output preview: | a preview of the output image is showed in a separate tab together with the image annotations (for almost all the tools that produce an image as output). The output view is also available for the Header Analysis and the Ancillary Data Dump tools and for all the tools that produce a standard TIFF file as output (Quick Look Generation, Footprint etc). |
License¶
BESTGUI is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.
