LizardTech^® announced the release of GeoExpress 8 earlier this week at GEOINT. We’re excited about this latest version of the industry’s go-to manipulation and compression software for raster imagery. Here’s our director of Product Management, Jon Skiffington, giving GISCafe’s Sanjay Gangal the lowdown directly from the show floor.

We’ve had a lot of requests in recent years for support for multispectral and hyperspectral imagery — imagery with more than just the three color bands R, G and B. GeoExpress^® software now supports imagery with up to 255 bands, which for NAIP data users might mean 4-band “RGB plus infrared” (RGBIR). Other users may have imagery with hundreds of narrow bands that they use in specialized analyses.

Support for alpha bands, also new in GeoExpress 8, means users can exercise greater control over transparency in their image data. In creating the alpha band, users can specify that all image data should be regarded as opaque, or they can have GeoExpress query the image metadata to find out what color values to use for transparency areas, or they can specify color values.

We also improved our support for composite mosaics, which in the past were really quick at the viewing end but took a long time to create. Now the speed advantage serves both ends; composite mosaics encode quickly and open quickly in viewers.

These features are all enabled by the fact that we’ve updated LizardTech’s MrSID^® image format. MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) is the next stage in the evolution of the image format geospatial users have turned into an industry standard. Support for MG4 in your favorite geospatial application by third parties is underway, and meantime, images compressed to MG4 can be viewed by either of LizardTech’s free viewers, the ExpressView™ Browser Plug-in utility or the standalone GeoViewer application (both available for download at http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/viewers.php).

We hope that if you’re a GeoExpress user, version 8 will be the answer to some imaging needs you may have been just starting to recognize.  And if you haven’t tried GeoExpress…well, there’s never been a better time. Visit our website at http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/trials.php for a trial download.

Let us know what you think of it!