Command line interface

📘

Cross-platform support

UgCS Mapper Tools is a true cross-platform application: all its features are available under all supported platforms. Both Mapper CLI and GUI are equally supported on MS Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and Apple macOS in the same way.

Multispecter alignment utility

Mapper Tools functionality for multispectral alignment is implementer as the coupler command-line application. All its functions are available via command-line arguments or environment variables.

🚧

CLI options and Environment variables

It's possible to choose how to specify every option or flag for coupler utility: put it in command-line arguments with every run or set as environment variables for once.

To take a list of all available options and flags just run coupler --help. Here we discuss the most important and useful parameters.

The most commonly used arguments set looks like this:
coupler -i c:\input -o c:\output -b blue,green,red -p raw -m .tif -w -v micasense*

Or, you can set these environment variables and simply run coupler :
export COUPLER_INPUT_DIR=/data/input
export COUPLER_OUTPUT_DIR=/data/output
export COUPLER_USE_BANDS=blue,green,red
export COUPLER_PRODUCT=raw
export COUPLER_INPUT_MASK=.tiff*
export COUPLER_REUSE_WARP=ON
export COUPLER_VENDOR=micasense
./coupler

The meaning for used options and flags:
Set -i -or --input-dir for the directory where source files are expected.
Set -o or --output-dir for the directory where to write aligned files.
Set -b or --bands to map spectral bands from the input directory into channels of output JPEGs.

🚧

JPEG channels

Output file format JPEG holds exactly 3 channels, it's always required to map source bands to 3 channels, even if only 2 are needed. It's possible to select one source band to fill 2 or 3 output channels: for example "red, red, NIR".

Commonly referred as "Red-Green-Blue" presentation of visible bands maps as "Blue-Green-Red" in JPEG format: set the order correctly to get an adequate visual representation.

📘

Micasense cameras bands list

It's possible can set with -b option any 3 of Red, Green, Blue, NIR, RedEdge.

Set -v or --vendor to select camera vendor: only "micasense" is supported at this moment.
Set -m or --mask to filter files from the input directory to import. Set it to mask out any unwanted files to be imported.
Set -w or --reuse-warp to calculate transformation matrix only for first capture and then reuse it for the rest of dataset. Greatly speed up the whole process.

❗️

Warp reuse is not always good

Most of the processing time with coupler utility is taken by warp matrix calculation. Once calculated for the single capture it may be applied to other captures without recalculation with good quality. This assumes what all shots are made approximately from the same altitude and angle.
If the dataset contains captures from different heights and angles, it's impossible to reuse once calculated transformation. Users should drop -w option (and it will take much more time to process) or manually split the dataset into several parts and process them independently.

Set -p or --product to select desired output result: raw data from original shots or values of radiance or reflection.