Running a Point Target Analysis

Here is a detailed description on how to execute a Point Target Analysis with SCT in three ways:

From the Command Line Interface (CLI) → user-facing execution
From the Python API → programmatic/scripting/orchestration integration
From the Testing Interface → automated validation

Prerequisites

SCT must be installed
A valid product must be available and its format plugin installed
A configuration file in TOML format (optional)
A testing registry (optional)

From CLI

Point target analysis can be performed using the following command just specifying the input product and the output directory. Obviously, an external file containing point targets locations and data must be provided in order to properly run the analysis.

CLI command

sct [--config <path_to_config>] point_target -p <product_path> -out <output_dir> \
    -pt <point_target_file_path> [-eo <path>] [-ec <path>] [-g]

where -g is used to enable graphs generation (if added to the command), -eo is used to specify the path to the external orbit file, -ec is used to specify the path to the external corrections product (i.e. ETAD products for Sentinel-1).

External Point Targets Data

The external source of point targets data provided as a .csv file must be compliant with the template that can be downloaded from the resources folder on GitHub.

Refer to the related documentation for more details.

From Python API

This analysis is also available directly from Python without using the CLI, and can be imported in any python script and executed as follows:

Python API

from pathlib import Path
from sct.analyses.point_target.main import full_point_target_analysis
from sct.analyses.point_target.config import SCTPointTargetAnalysisConfig

# this is the default, but parameters can be set here
config = SCTPointTargetAnalysisConfig()

csv_results_path = full_point_target_analysis(
    product=Path("path/to/product"),
    point_target_source=Path("path/to/point_target_source.csv"),
    output_directory=Path("path/to/output_directory"),
    config=config,  # optional, can be None
    graphs=True,  # optional, can be False
)

From Testing Interface

This analysis also provides a testing interface, which can be used to run the analysis from the SCT Testing Framework. To do so, a registry .json file containing test cases must be created and provided to the testing CLI interface.

testing_registry.json

{
    "product-format-type": {
        "test-case-1": {
            "analysis": "point_target",
            "product": "path/to/product/1",
            "config": "path/to/config/if/needed",
            "targets": "path/to/point_target_source.csv",
            "reference_output": "path/to/output/reference/results/csv/for/validation/purposes"
        },
        "test-case-2": {
            "analysis": "point_target",
            "product": "path/to/product/2",
            "config": "path/to/config/if/needed",
            "targets": "path/to/point_target_source.csv",
            "reference_output": "path/to/output/reference/results/csv/for/validation/purposes"
        }
    }
}

Then the testing CLI interface can be used as follows:

Testing Interface

sct testing test -r <path_to_registry_file> -out <output_dir> [-g]

When a reference_output is provided, the testing CLI interface will compare the results with the reference output and report any discrepancy.