What alternatives to Orfeo are out there and what are the pros and cons of each?

Question

I'm interested in using a library for abstracting the common, repeatable tasks that entail the usage of GDAL (like registiring a driver, getting bands.. etc). In general, GDAL is "low-level" and most of the time there are a lot of copy-pasted code all over a project. I need something on-top of GDAL that hides all the "day-to-day" tasks. For example, for rasters I'd like to have a cube-based view of the it (kind-of what the python bindings do but for C++).

Orfeo seems to fit the bill (taken from Orfeo's homepage):

• image access
• filtering
• feature extraction
• image segmentation
• classification
• change detection

But I'd be using only its image-abstraction functionality, so it seems an overkill.

Before embracing the use of it I'd like to know if there are other alternatives and what are their pros and cons.

Answer 1

As johanvdw said SAGA could be an alternative. And what about OSSIM or simply, GRASS?

By the way, an integration of SAGA modules has been done into the latest qgis version (1.7). You should maybe have a glance on that. To follow-up on that topic, it seems a common interface would be developed as unique framework to these mentioned softwares.

Answer 2

One option could be using the (gdal) module of saga to convert your grid to the saga format. Once this is done SAGA GIS has a nice api and many modules for accessing grid data. See eg: example module and grid class.