Tutorials

Tutorials#

Three end-to-end notebooks. All use openly available data; no NASA Earthdata or Vantor credentials, no API keys.

To run these notebooks, launch the Codespace first

The tutorial pages below are static renders of the notebooks in notebooks/, shown with saved outputs. To run them yourself, open this repo in a GitHub Codespace; it boots with ASP, asp-plot, and the demo data scripts already installed, so the notebooks run top to bottom with no setup. Running on your own machine instead needs the local install.

1. ASTER Mt. Rainier

Stereo from a single ASTER L1A scene. The gentlest end-to-end flow:

  • aster2asp to extract nadir + back-looking views

  • parallel_stereo + point2dem on the raw imagery

  • COP-DEM clip from AWS Open Data

  • mapproject + parallel_stereo re-run on the orthorectified pair

  • asp-plot PDF report for each pass

Output: two ~30 m DEMs of Mt. Rainier, raw and orthorectified.

Tutorial 1 — ASTER Mt. Rainier
2. WorldView-3 UCSD

Stereo from a high-resolution commercial-style WV3 pair (SpaceNet CORE3D, openly hosted on AWS). The full recipe:

  • Stereo geometry analysis with StereoGeometryPlotter

  • COP-DEM clip from AWS Open Data

  • mapproject to the COP-DEM grid

  • parallel_stereo on the orthorectified pair

  • asp_plot PDF report with ICESat-2 alignment (pc_align runs by default)

Output: 4 m DEM of the UCSD campus and sea cliffs.

Tutorial 2 — WorldView-3 UCSD
3. WorldView-3 UCSD with bundle adjustment

Variant of Tutorial 2 that adds bundle_adjust to refine the vendor RPC cameras before orthorectification. Outputs are suffixed _ba, so both runs share a data directory and the two asp-plot reports can be compared side by side.

Tutorial 3 — WorldView-3 UCSD (with bundle adjustment)

Suggested order#

If you’ve never run ASP before, do the ASTER tutorial first. It has fewer parameters, and a coarser resolution.

The WorldView tutorial then adds cropping and a finer resolution, higher accuracy result. The bundle-adjustment variant comes last: run it after Tutorial 2 and compare the reports to see what camera refinement adds.

Beyond the tutorials#

The asp-plot example notebooks cover jitter correction, planetary missions (LRO NAC, Mars MOC NA, CTX), variants that skip orthorectification, and scene selection.

If a notebook fails or a step is unclear, open a problem report.