John Warden, senior geospatial engineer at Thermopylae Sciences and Technology, won the iPad in our contest at the Esri User Conference in San Diego two and a half weeks ago. As part of our celebration this year of twenty years of MrSID as a technology and of LizardTech as a company, we had asked folks to write in telling us how they had benefited from or been supported by the MrSID format. Names were then randomly selected from among the entries.

Mr. Warden wrote:

“A few months after starting my job as the geospatial engineer for our company, the earthquake hit Haiti. We were involved in supporting relief efforts by creating a data sharing platform. Imagery was downloaded around the clock, some satellite imagery and some aerial imagery. One of the sets of aerial imagery had significant overlap and was in TIFF format, we had hundreds of gigabytes contained in thousands of files… until I ran it through my LizardTech software [GeoExpress], reducing the overall size to a few gigabytes of data in less than a dozen files.”

He says he plans to take his new iPad everywhere he goes, which will probably provoke jealousy in his plastic LizardTech lizard, which has to stay behind on top of his computer monitor.

Our two other winners, who each took away a $50 Amazon gift card, are Wayne Scribbins, geospatial coordinator for the City of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Paul Huppé, applications developer at the Data Management Division of Natural Resources Canada. You can read their testimony and that of others who wrote in to wish MrSID and LizardTech a happy twentieth anniversary here: http://www.lizardtech.com/anniversary/

Thanks to all who participated in our contest, and to all who have supported LizardTech over the past two decades.

LizardTech business partner Ascent GIS assists organizations and businesses that are interested in building and maintaining spatial information by providing GIS and image processing services. They use GeoExpress to handle large volumes of imagery, mostly in MrSID and GeoTIFF format, in their public and private partnerships across the U.S., providing the latest and most current imagery and LiDAR data to forestry, state and local government, engineering, and utilities industries.

We spoke with Russ Martin, GIS analyst for Ascent, about their experience with MG4, the new version of the MrSID format, and especially about how MG4′s alpha bands help with transparency, and we’d like to share his comments with you.

“Recently, LizardTech launched the new MrSID Generation 4 (MG4) format. In the past, displaying two MrSID images with irregular boundaries, like county mosaics, in ArcMap resulted in areas of nodata “noise” (black pixelation) between the images when the background layer was set to transparent. This occurred because some of the pixels around the edges of the MG3 images do not have the value of 0,0,0.

Noise (speckling) in MG3 caused by nodata. Note the non-zero pixel values. Image courtesy of NAIP.

“In the MG4 format, after the data is clipped inside of the nodata boundary, the non 0,0,0 pixels are still present, but setting the Alpha channel on the fourth band completely eliminates the “noise” between the MG4 images.

MG4′s alpha channel takes care of the no data pixels for a clean boundary. Image courtesy of NAIP.

“We receive so much data in MrSID format — roughly 1.5 terabytes for a single project recently — and we anticipate processing another 6 terabytes in the next two months. The continuing transition of the aerial photo industry to digital sensors has resulted in a great deal of 4-band imagery with very large file sizes, which can be compressed and stored in the MG4 format. This is essential for field and mobile GIS solutions on laptops and other mobile devices.”

There you have it — the straight scoop on alpha bands in MG4 from our friends at Ascent GIS! We wish it was always so easy to find people to give testimonials that are little technical papers at the same time! By the way, we call that black pixelation “speckling”, and GeoExpress has a way to “despeckle” MG3 images when they run afoul of nodata.  

To learn more about the evolution of the MrSID format see this article from the knowledge base on our website and this PDF detailing the history of GeoExpress software (viewing the PDF requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).

Recently we were contacted by Alfred Sawatzky, a product manager for iFactor Consulting, who had a Smallworld-using customer interested in seeing how iFactor’s Web Maps Connector would perform when serving imagery via LizardTech’s Express Server® Software. Web Maps Connector provides access to the data and services provided by Microsoft Bing™ Maps in GE’s Smallworld applications.

With a copy of Express Server, Alfred created a simple workflow within the corporate firewall where he demonstrated how to use Express Server to serve a potential customer’s internal MrSID® imagery overtop Bing data from the cloud within Web Maps Connector. In this demonstration, the customer has MrSID imagery of Pennsylvania that is more recent than the imagery from Bing and they wanted to expose their current imagery over the old to ensure they’re dealing with the most up to date data.

As Alfred mentions in his blog, “sworldwatch”, although GE’s Smallworld SOMs (spatial objects managers) provide a plug-in for viewing MrSID files, “The nice thing about using Express Server is that it does all the georeferencing/tile-stitching for you so you no longer need to configure a MrSID SOM with things like multiple path names, coordinate system, etc. You can use the GE WMS SOM to simply connect to the Express Server layers and you get all the imagery stitched together.” You can “leave the MrSID file access to Express Server and enjoy a seamless cross-tile experience in Smallworld using the Web Maps Connector module.”

This is a new and exciting prospect for both iFactor Consulting and LizardTech, who can now offer another great software solution to Smallworld customers working with MrSID imagery.

Last year we helped solutions provider Smartronix address some image delivery pains that their customer, the Air Force Special Operations Command, was experiencing. The AFSOC need to process huge amounts of satellite and aerial imagery quickly, store it efficiently, and access it instantly in common geospatial applications and viewers. In particular, they wanted to store terabytes of raw imagery in an Oracle database and view it via both MapViewer and ArcIMS.

Smartronix asked if we could make that happen. We said “Yes we can.”

We’re pretty excited about this “win” because it’s a high profile example of an Express Suite workflow.  Express Suite comprises all three of LizardTech’s major geospatial software products, GeoExpress for image manipulation and compression to industry standard formats, Spatial Express for storing compressed images in an Oracle database, and Express Server for serving out those images via the fastest and most stable delivery technology available.

We worked hard to make all three products interoperate seamlessly with each other and with common GIS software, so it’s great to see the trio succeed on the road.  

Read the entire Smartronix-AFSOC case study on the Express Suite “Customers” page on our website.

The State of New Jersey’s 2007 orthoimagery is now available for download from the New Jersey Geographic Information Network’s newly-designed NJ Information Warehouse, which uses LizardTech’s Express Server to serve all compressed orthoimagery layers.

The imagery is available in both MrSID format (compressed 8-bit, 3-band, RGB natural color, 5000′ by 5000′ tiles) and JPEG 2000 format (compressed 8-bit, 4-band RGB plus infrared, 5000′ by 5000′ tiles). The site looks great and is easy to use, and we’re pretty proud of the way Express Server performs on it.

You can add the WMS layer of New Jersey’s 2007 orthoimagery into any application supporting WMS by entering the following URL:

http://njwebmap.state.nj.us/njorthos