VTbuilder and Petmar MICRODEM easily handle SRTM, ASTER, Landsat etc. with a wealth of functions and they are for free. I have used them many times even for publications.

Data are also available for free, e.g., on the GLCF website, at GLOVIS, the ERSDAC page or geobase.ca (Canada).

Try out ENVI:

See

https://www.exelisvis.com/ProductsServices/ENVI/ENVI.aspx

and enjoy

Farnk

If you want to use opensource then try GRASS otherwise you can go for the educational licence of PCI Geomatica..

If you can purchase a licence I would say ENVI, if you want a open acess software I would recomend a Brazilian software called SPRING (http://www.dpi.inpe.br/spring/). It is not a easy software, but for teaching remote sensing it may be good, since there is not a button for everything, you will need to do step by step everything and sometimes also programing, so the student need to know what he or she is doing, it is not just pressing buttons.

This year I have been teaching introductory RS courses with the open source QGIS 2.0. It now has fully integration with SAGA and others and allows for simple imagery classification algorithms, as well as for direct integration with GIS. I would suggest you giving it a try. Check the semi-automatic classification and the good blog by Luca Congedo at http://fromgistors.blogspot.pt/. Of course, this package does not replace a professional one such as ENVI. Cheers.

Also check ESA's free toolboxes for processing of optical and radar data:

VISTA/BEAM:

http://www.brockmann-consult.de/cms/web/beam/

NEST:

https://earth.esa.int/web/nest/home/

We teach Remote Sensing at post-graduated level since many years on the basis of open-source software. This is very much appreciated by our students as they can use their own laptops which also motivates them to work on the material at home. Currently we are using Qgis with the Sextante processing plugin which allows a wide range of RS applications (e.g. Saga Gis and OTB). If you are interessted in further details check our wiki here:

http://wiki.awf.forst.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/index.php/Category:Remote_sensing_and_image_processing_with_open_source_software

Try GRASS!

If you are interested in processing SAR data: DORIS, ROI-PAC and NEXT.

ILWIS is a good option!!

ILWIS was developed by ITC in the Netherlands (www.itc.nl), with the aim of avoiding the cost of buying expensive software.. It has a comprehensive 'click this-do this-code like this' user guide of 13 chapters on using ILWIS for GIS and Remote Sensing with example data (http://www.itc.nl/ilwis/documentation/version3.asp) and then another set of another 27 example applications of ILWIS to solve real world challenges (http://www.itc.nl/ilwis/documentation/version_2/aguide.asp). i think this will greatly help your students.

The challenge for some people is that some functionality in ILWIS is not a click option as in ENVI or ERDAS, you have to use your brain a bit and develop some scripts/codes... you have to like using the command line to develop some scripts to produce an output - its great for teaching, at least the student understands what is what happening rather just clicking!!

And ohh ILWIS is now open source, hosted by 52 North

However, the software is unstable at times... i recommend besides having the latest version of ILWIS, also have the version 3.2 or 3.3, which was produced by ITC before it 'gave up' the in-house development work to 52 North!!

Did you try the BEAM and NEST software (already mentioned by Tobias Ullmann below)? They are under maintenance (NEST 5.1 was released 2 days ago, BEAM 5.0 will follow shortly) and have a long term strategy as they will become ESA's Toolboxes in the Sentinel era. Of course, they work with multi sensor optical and radar data, not only ESA's own instruments.

http://www.brockmann-consult.de/cms/web/beam/

https://earth.esa.int/web/nest/home/

if you can write any code, you can use GDAL functionality through R. GDAL libraries are the backend for almost all the software mentioned above. the rgdal, rgeos and raster libraries can handle most anything. If you need a GUI, QGIS is a good bet too (Paul Magdon's post).

Endorsing Igor Ogashawara, i suggest SPRING and Terraview softwares. They're a little complicated, but a little bit practicing should solve this problem.

I don't know if you will work with SAR imagery, but i would suggest PolSARPRO and NEST. http://earth.eo.esa.int/polsarpro/ and http://nest.array.ca/web/nest

And, also related, Weka for datamining and R for statistical analysis.

You can try Hypercube, developed by the US Army. It doesn't have all the functionality of ENVI for satellite specific tasks, but has a nice set of functions.

Hi Robert,

Maybe using software from ESA might be a sensitive issue when teaching Remote Sensing at the Central Washington University. But ESA and NASA have a lot of joint ventures no? Spacelab and the like.

The following link guides you to ESA software developed for students in Remote Sensing:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Eduspace_EN/SEMHA60P0WF_0.html

Have a peek, maybe it suits your requirements. Updates are regular. There is also a free ArcExplorer version available,... made by ESRI by the way.

I use ENVI in my courses, expensive indeed, but there is FreeEnvi as well, which lacks some features but is interesting for educational purposes as well. In principle universities should get a significant reduction from ESRI as well for ENVI when using the stand alone compiled version ENVI. Check it out.

Cheers,

Frank