Track: New Technology and Technology Integration
MrSID and the Massive Image Protocol Committee
John R. Grizz DealJonathan Bradley, Ph.D. , Vance Faber, Ph.D., Gene Roberts, US Library of Congress George Lee, US Geological Survey Jim Mauck, US Geological Survey
The Multiresolution Seamless Image Database (MrSID) technology provides a seamless wavelet-based compression of images of arbitrarily large dimension. This is particularly important in remote sensing where mosaics of rectified images can comprise billions of pixels. The compression technology used in MrSID incorporates the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which has recently found widespread use in image compression applications due to its ability to yield high-quality imagery at high compression ratios. The use of the DWT in the compression process is compatible with a decompression routine having some desirable properties. Due to the local nature of the DWT, MrSID allows a rapid local retrieval of the compressed image data. The user may request an image window of arbitrary dimension and location in the image to be extracted from the compressed data. Moreover, due to the multiscale nature of the DWT the decompressed image data may exist at a number of different resolutions, providing the ability not only to pan about an image but also to zoom. The multiresolution aspect is important since it facilitates database navigation by allowing a user to visualize larger portions of the data set. MrSID is the base technology behind the Massive Image Protocol.
John R. Grizz Deal
LizardTech and MIP Committee
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