Copyright 2021 United States Government as represented by the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. No copyright is claimed in the United States under Title 17, U.S. Code. All Other Rights Reserved.
We are working a new release for GIANT hopefully before April of 2025 which will have new features and a revamped and much more performant ray tracer that fully works on windows too!
The Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation Tool (GIANT) is a collection of utilities and scripts that aims to make all aspects of Optical Navigation (OpNav) and Camera Calibration easy.
To install it is recommended that you use the mamba-forge python distribution/package manager.
More detailed instructions can be found in the GIANT documentation (documentation/html/index.html or https://aliounis.github.io/giant_documentation/installation.html)
The first thing to do is to download the GIANT git repository:
git clone git@github.com:nasa/giant.git
Once the download is complete, cd into the new giant directory
cd giant
If your are on Windows, you will need to manually install Visual Studio 2017 using the instructions at https://conda-forge.org/docs/maintainer/knowledge_base.html#local-testing and imagemagick (https://imagemagick.org/script/download.php)
GIANT is designed to work with python 3.7+ so it is likely that we will need to create a new environment in mamba for our work. To create an environment from the terminal (or mamba prompt for windows) simply type
mamba create -n giant_env python=3 opencv matplotlib scipy pandas numpy cython pyqt astropy lxml sphinx spiceypy c-compiler openmp astroquery dill psutil
which will create a virtual environment with python and all of the usual python tools (setuptools, pip, etc). Once the virtual environment has been created you can run
conda activate giant_env
to activate the environment. Activating the environment basically adjusts your paths/aliases so that "python", "pip", etc now point to the virtual environment executables.
If you are on OSX you will also likely need to set the environment variable CPATH
export CPATH=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include
or
export CPATH=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include
to set where to find the system headers.
If you are on Linux or OSX you can also include "imagemagick" at the end of the mamba create command to install imagemagick, or install after activating the environment with
mamba install imagemagick.
With our GIANT environment activated we are good to install GIANT. GIANT is installed like any normal python package. Simply navigate to the root directory of GIANT and type (note that we use the link option here because GIANT is still under development and this allows you to update with a simple git pull.
cd giant
pip install -e
This will install the GIANT package to your virtual environment along with all of its dependencies. Once GIANT is installed you can run some basic tests to make sure everything is working by entering the unittests directory and typing
cd unittests
python -Wignore -m unittest discover
This might return some warnings but at the end of it all it should say "ok" and something about all of the tests passing.
GIANT is now installed and you can begin navigating.
See the GIANT documentation (documentation/html/index.html or https://aliounis.github.io/giant_documentation/) for more information.