1. Introduction

The NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) is a suite of free and open source automated geodesy and stereogrammetry tools designed for processing images captured from satellites, around Earth and other planets (Section 8), robotic rovers (Section 10.3, Section 8.12.5), aerial cameras (Section 9.1), low-cost satellites (Section 8.31), and historical images (Section 8.32).

ASP supports a wide range of camera models, including linescan, frame, pushframe (Section 8.17), optical bar, RPC, and the USGS Community Sensor Model (Section 8.12). It can create cameras from scratch and refine them with bundle adjustment (Section 16.5), solving for pose, jitter (Section 16.40), lens distortion (Section 12.2.1), and rig calibration (Section 16.62).

It has functionality for 3D terrain creation from stereo (Section 3), including shallow-water bathymetry (Section 8.36), alignment of point clouds (Section 16.55), mapprojection (Section 16.43), structure-from-motion (Section 9.1), shape-from-shading (Section 11.1), GCP generation (Section 16.25, Section 16.18), and a versatile GUI shell (Section 16.74).

ASP produces cartographic products, including digital terrain models (DTMs) and ortho-projected images (Section 6.2.2), 3D models (Section 16.60), textured meshes (Section 10.2), and bundle-adjusted networks of cameras (Section 16.5.10).

ASP’s data products are suitable for science analysis, mission planning, and public outreach.

3D model of Mars

Fig. 1.1 This 3D model was generated from a image pair M01/00115 and E02/01461 (34.66N, 141.29E). The complete stereo reconstruction process takes approximately thirty minutes on a 3.0 GHz workstation for input images of this size (1024 × 8064 pixels). This model, shown here without vertical exaggeration, is roughly 2 km wide in the cross-track dimension.

1.1. Background

ASP is developed by the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) at the NASA Ames Research Center. It builds on more than two decades of planetary 3D surface reconstruction, first demonstrated on the Mars Pathfinder mission and since delivered to the MPL, MER, MRO, and LRO science operations teams.

1.2. Software foundations

1.2.1. NASA Vision Workbench

The Stereo Pipeline is built upon the Vision Workbench software which is a general purpose image processing and computer vision library also developed by the IRG. Some of the tools discussed in this document are actually Vision Workbench programs, and any distribution of the Stereo Pipeline requires the Vision Workbench. This distinction is important only if compiling this software.

1.2.2. The USGS Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers

For processing non-terrestrial NASA satellite images, Stereo Pipeline must be installed alongside a copy of the Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers (ISIS, Section 2.3.1). ISIS is however not required for processing terrestrial images (Section 5).

ISIS is widely used in the planetary science community for processing raw spacecraft images into high level data products of scientific interest such as map-projected and mosaicked images [USGS09, AndersonSidesSoltesz+04, GaddisAndersonBecker+97].

1.3. Getting help and reporting bugs

All bugs, feature requests, and general discussion should be posted on the ASP support forum:

To contact the developers and project manager directly, send an email to:

When you submit a bug report, it may be helpful to attach the logs output by parallel_stereo and other tools (Section 20.2).

1.4. Typographical conventions

Program names and their command line options are shown in a constant-width font, such as parallel_stereo.

Commands to type in a terminal are shown indented and constant-width. A > prompt is a regular shell. An ISIS> prompt is an ISIS-enabled shell (ISISROOT set and the ISIS startup script sourced):

> ls

ISIS> pds2isis

In a command, <value> is an argument you supply, [ ] marks optional items, a|b are alternatives, ( ) gives a default or note, and a trailing backslash continues the command on the next line:

point2dem [-h|--help] [-r moon|mars] [-s <float(default: 0.0)>] \
          [-o <output prefix>] <output prefix>-PC.tif

1.5. Citing the Ames Stereo Pipeline

In general, use this reference:

Beyer, Ross A., Oleg Alexandrov, and Scott McMichael. 2018. The Ames Stereo Pipeline: NASA’s open source software for deriving and processing terrain data. Earth and Space Science, 5. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EA000409.

If you are using ASP for application to Earth images, or need a reference which details the quality of output, then we suggest also referencing:

Shean, D. E., O. Alexandrov, Z. Moratto, B. E. Smith, I. R. Joughin, C. C. Porter, Morin, P. J. 2016. An automated, open-source pipeline for mass production of digital elevation models (DEMs) from very high-resolution commercial stereo satellite imagery. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. 116.

In addition to using the references above, in order to help you better cite the specific version of ASP that you are using in a work, as of ASP version 2.6.0, we have started using Zenodo to create digital object identifiers (DOIs) for each ASP release. For example, the DOI for version 2.6.2 is 10.5281/zenodo.3247734, and you can cite it like this:

Beyer, Ross A., Oleg Alexandrov, and Scott McMichael. 2019. NeoGeographyToolkit/StereoPipeline: Ames Stereo Pipeline version 2.6.2. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3247734.

Of course, every new release of ASP will have its own unique DOI, and this link should always point to the latest DOI for ASP.

If you publish a paper using ASP, please let us know. We’ll cite your work in this document, in Section 23.

1.6. Warnings to users of the Ames Stereo Pipeline

Ames Stereo Pipeline is a research product. It may have bugs or incomplete features, and its APIs and command line options may change between releases. Use it at your own risk.

The algorithms are robust, but the tools have many adjustable parameters, and even experienced operators can produce poor results. Inspect every product before relying on it, and watch for errors from poor input data or unsuitable settings. If you have concerns about a product, contact us (Section 1.3). We can help improve it, or describe the limitations of the data.

See each release’s NEWS file (Section 24) for a summary of recent changes.