The NASA Vision Workbench (VW) is a modular, extensible, cross-platform computer vision software framework written in C++. It was designed to support a variety of space exploration tasks, including automated science and engineering analysis, robot perception, and 2D/3D environment reconstruction, though it can also serve as a general-purpose image processing and machine vision framework in other contexts as well. The VW was developed within the Autonomous Systems and Robotics area of the Inteligent Systems Division at NASA's Ames Research Center.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a project to build an 8.4m telescope at Cerro Pachon, Chile and survey the entire sky every three days starting around 2014. The scientific goals of the project range from characterizing the population of largish asteroids which are in orbits that could hit the Earth to understanding the nature of the dark energy that is causing the Universe's expansion to accelerate. The application codes, which handle the images coming from the telescope and generate catalogs of astronomical sources, are being implemented in C++, exported to python using swig. The pipeline processing framework allows these python modules to be connected together to process data in a parallel environment.