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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B3, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Launched last December 17, 2011, the first satellite of the 
Pleiades system allows very high resolution images acquisition. 
This system is made of two "small satellites" (mass of one ton) 
offering a spatial resolution at nadir of 0.7 meters and a field of 
view of 20 kilometers. The second satellite will be launched end 
of 2012. 
The great agility of those two satellites enables a daily access all 
over the world, which is a critical need for defence and civil 
security applications, and a coverage capacity necessary for the 
cartographic applications at scales better than those accessible 
to SPOT satellites family. Moreover, Pleiades has very high 
stereoscopic acquisition capacity to meet the fine cartography 
needs, notably in urban regions, and to bring information 
complementary to aerial photography. 
ORFEO, the Pleiades Accompaniment Program, was set up by 
CNES, the French Space Agency, to prepare, accompany and 
promote the use and the exploitation of the images acquired by 
this very high resolution optical sensor, especially in public 
sector. It was initiated in 2004 and will last until the end of the 
first year of the satellite life. The objectives of this program are 
1) to assess the thematic capability of the Pleiades system to 
produce the various services required by end-users for distinct 
domains (defence, risks, cartography, hydrology, forestry, 
agriculture, ...) and 2) to develop efficient tools to facilitate 
image information extraction by end-users. 
Pleiades imagery will be available at Astrium GEO-Information 
Services (exclusive provider) with specific conditions and 
prices for public service European users, through a “Public 
Service Delegation" giving access to 40% of Pleiades resources. 
It was therefore a key issue to prepare the institutional 
community to this new data source. This paper presents the 
ORFEO program achievements (thematic and methodology) 
and its application during the first year of life of Pleiades-1A 
(April 2012 - June 2013). 
2. ORFEO ACOMPANIMENT PROGRAM: THE 
THEMATIC PART 
The Thematic part of the ORFEO accompaniment program 
covers a large range of applications, and aims at specifying and 
validating products and services required by users. An in-depth 
work of user needs assessments in eight domains (sea and 
coastline, risks and humanitarian aid, cartography and urban 
planning, geophysical hazards, hydrology, forestry, agriculture 
and defence) has given rise to a large number of feasibility 
studies from 2006 to 2011. Since 2006, more than 40 studies 
have been led by scientists and thematic experts from French 
and Belgium institutions, in close link with public end-users 
such as Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Ecology, 
French national cartographic institute, etc. Such studies, 
generally based on student internships, have been performed 
with imagery support provided by CNES both in optical domain 
(WorldView-2, QuickBird, Ikonos, GeoEye-l, Kompsat, 
Formosat, aerial images) and radar domain (TerraSAR-X, 
COSMO-SkyMed, aerial images). 
Pleiades-1A is in orbit since December 2011. As soon as March 
2012, the ORFEO program entered in its final year with “users 
thematic commissioning" activities. This year is a direct follow- 
up of ORFEO program objectives and philosophy, aiming at 
331 
supporting and encouraging institutional use of Pleiades, 
performing research, R&D and demonstration projects required 
by institutional actors. Free open-source image handling and 
processing tools set up in the ORFEO methodological part are 
provided, if needed, for easier access to data. 
Such activities are performed in complementarity and in 
synergy with Astrium GEO-Information Services marketing 
activities, aiming at developing Pleiades market among 
commercial users and at setting up certified and qualified 
commercial services. 
During the Users Thematic Commissioning phase, the most 
promising studies since 2006 are being assessed with Pleiades 
imagery, in the eight domains of interest. Several key issues 
such as response to crisis, urban planning, human pressure on 
coastlines, watershed cartography, forest management are 
thoroughly studied. 
In addition, a number of technical key assets of Pleiades system 
are validated by users, such as covering a whole administrative 
region in a single pass (one orbit), creating a mosaic of 100x100 
km? with certified geometry and radiometry, acquiring multi- 
stereo data (tri or more) to extract altitude information not only 
on terrain, but also on buildings. Around 400-500 Pleiades 
images are specifically devoted to this thematic commissioning 
year, on about 50 sites around the world. Of course, geographic 
sites with major disasters or specific events not predictable will 
be covered so that Risks and Humanitarian activities can be 
performed during this period. 
A specific seminar will be held in October 2013 to present the 
results of this large panel of public sector driven studies. Main 
French ministries (Ecology, Internal Affairs, Agriculture and 
Forestry...) and European bodies such as GMES project will be 
involved. 
3. ORFEO ACCOMPANIMENT PROGRAM: THE 
METHODOLOGICAL PART 
The Methodological Part of the ORFEO accompaniment 
program aims at preparing the use and exploitation of Pleiades 
sub-metric images. This preparation includes capitalising on 
image analysis R\&D results and know-how, and assisting the 
work of the thematic group and more widely of the future users 
by providing them with algorithms, methods and easily 
available tools to visualise and process the images for their 
needs. To achieve this, CNES decided in 2005 to develop and 
maintain, in the frame of the ORFEO accompaniment program, 
the Orfeo ToolBox (OTB), an open-source remote sensing 
image processing library. 
3.1 The Orfeo ToolBox in a nutshell 
The Orfeo ToolBox (CNES, www.orfeo-toolbox.org, Inglada et 
al., 2009, Christophe et al., 2009)) is written in C++ on top of 
ITK (Insights Toolkit, www.itk.org), a medical image 
processing library, and interfaces seamlessly with other open- 
source image processing software such as GDAL (GeoData 
Abstraction Layer, www.gdal.org ) or OSSIM (Awesome Image 
Processing, www.ossim.org) . Orfeo ToolBox is released under 
the CeCILL Open source license (equivalent to GPL) and is 
available on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS 
X) OTB comes with a modular architecture and natural