Sentinel Toolbox Overview

SNAP

Overview

The Sentinel Application Platform - or SNAP - in short is a collection of executable tools and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which have been developed to facilitate the utilisation, viewing and processing of a variety of remotely sensed data. The functionality of SNAP is accessed through the Sentinel Toolbox. The purpose of the Sentinel Toolbox is not to duplicate existing commercial packages, but to complement them with functions dedicated to the handling of data products of earth observing satellites.

The main components of the Sentinel Toolbox are:

• An intuitive desktop application used for EO data visualisation, analysing and processing.
• A set of scientific data processors running either from the command-line or invoked by the desktop application.
• The command-line tool gpt (graph processing tool) is used to execute processing graphs made up of operators nodes developed using the SNAP GPF (see Java API below).
• A data product converter tool pconvert allowing a user to convert raw data products to the BEAM-DIMAP standard format, to GeoTIFF, to HDF-5 or to RGB images.
• A Java™ API which provides ready-to-use components for remote sensing related application development and plug-in points for new SNAP extension modules. Besides a number of extension points such as product reader and writers, the SNAP API comprises the Graph Processing Framework (GPF) which is used to rapidly create raster data processors. The Rich Client Platform is used to develop rich GUI user interface applications based on SNAP.

Standard Product Format

The Sentinel Toolbox application and the scientific data processors use a simple data input/output format, which makes it easy to import data in other imaging applications. The format is called DIMAP^® and has been developed by SPOT-Image, France. The SNAP software uses a special DIMAP profile called BEAM-DIMAP, which has the following characteristics:

• A single product header (XML) containing the product meta-data
• An associated data directory containing ENVI^®-compatible images for each band.
• Each image in the directory is composed of a header file (ASCII text) and an image data file (flat binary)

Source Code

The complete SNAP software has been developed under the GNU public license and comes with full source code (Java^TM). The source code is available on GitHub https://github.com/senbox-org

Supported Platforms

SNAP is programmed in pure Java™ to allow a maximum portability. The SNAP software has been successfully tested under MS Windows™ XP^®, Vista, 7,8,10 and also Mac OS X and as well as under Linux and Solaris^® operating systems.