We’re excited about the release of Express Server® 7 image serving software. You already know that Express Server is the fastest, most stable, and easiest way to distribute high-resolution raster imagery. Who doesn’t know that? But what you may not know is that besides running as a 32-bit application as it always has, Express Server also can be installed as a 64-bit application on 64-bit systems, which means you can take full advantage of increased memory for performance gains.

Express Server 7 is available now.

And that’s just one reason to look at the new version of Express Server. Here’s another: support for MG4™, the latest version of LizardTech’s MrSID® image format. Through the use of alpha bands, MrSID Generation 4 enables true transparency, which means Express Server 7 can deliver better looking mosaics.

Even more exciting, MG4 supports multi- and hyperspectral imagery, and Express Server 7 enables you to specify any three bands to serve out. You can create any number of band-mapped catalogs so that any image in a given catalog will be served with your desired band arrangement. You can also use the same image for any number of band groupings. This gives you unprecedented flexibility in serving imagery for your geospatial end users.

We hope you like Express Server 7 as much as we do. If you’re at the 2011 Esri User Conference this week, stop by and visit our team at Booth #1311. They’ll be happy to talk with you about image delivery or any other needs you have.

For more information about Express Server, visit http://www.lizardtech.com/products/exp/.

Good news, LiDAR users. Our friends at GeoCue Corporation have announced that they’re integrating support for the MrSID Generation 4 (MG4) format into their popular LP360 software applications. GeoCue is the parent company of QCoherent Software LLC, the makers of the LP360 product line.
 
This means that geospatial professionals using LP360, a LiDAR software extension for the Esri™ ArcGIS environment, will be able to efficiently input and decode LiDAR data that has been compressed using LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor™ software. MG4, the latest version of the MrSID format, accommodates new GIS technologies by supporting multi- and hyperspectral imagery, LiDAR point cloud data, multiterabyte datasets, and other innovations.
 
GeoCue’s customers have asked them for tools to input, decode and view compressed LiDAR point clouds, says Lewis Graham, the company’s president and CTO, noting that now they’ll be able to do so easily.
 
We’re excited about the integration, too, because one of our objectives is to ensure that MrSID files can be used in the widest possible array of applications used in our industry. Now LP360 users will be able to handle compressed LiDAR datasets in ArcGIS, which adds to the number of applications that support MG4. (You can find a complete list under “Third Party Integrations” at http://www.lizardtech.com/products/lidar/.)

The newly released MrSID Decode SDK is really two sets of libraries and tools in one package. And part of it was released more than a year ago under another name. Hopefully, geospatial professionals have more to do than wonder why this is, but for those with light workloads or long memories, here’s some background that we hope will address any confusion you may have.

In 2009 LizardTech introduced an updated version of the MrSID format that the geospatial industry has been relying on for years. We called it MrSID Generation 4 (MG4) and we released a “decode SDK” so that developers could begin building supporting for MG4 into their applications.

What was most unusual about MG4 was that it was a version of the format specifically updated to support the compression of LiDAR data. That is, the SDK enabled support for files compressed to MG4 using LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor software. MG4 (and its SDK) would not support raster imagery for another year, during which we returned our attention and energies to GeoExpress, our raster image toolset and compression engine, to evaluate and implement the features our customers most wanted in the way of new features.

GeoExpress 8, with its support for alpha bands and multispectral imagery and its improved mosaicking, is a product we’ve long been excited about releasing. It came out in November of last year, and it looks as though our customers have once again steered us straight about the features that are most important to them, because the response to the new release has been very enthusiastic.

In the wake of the GeoExpress 8 launch, we’ve just released the decode SDK that combines MG4’s LiDAR capabilities with support for the new raster advancements in GeoExpress, bringing the MG4 story into full resolution, as it were. The updated SDK is called the MrSID Decode SDK, and as we noted at the beginning it’s really two toolsets in one. However, the toolsets are designed to work together. For instance, we include a sample application that shows you how to easily determine whether a file is composed of raster or LiDAR data and then shunt off the processing to the correct section of the SDK.

When you download the MrSID Decode SDK you have everything you need to integrate support into your applications for either LiDAR data or raster imagery in the MG4 format. It also enables support for viewing and decoding imagery compressed to both of the classical versions of the format, MG3 and MG2.

It’s an exciting season to be working with compressed LiDAR and raster image data. We’re happy to be making tools that developers can use to make their applications more useful to more geospatial users. The MrSID Decode SDK is available for download on our developer website.

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!

Last July we unveiled the MrSID® Generation 4 Decode SDK to coincide with our release of the first groundbreaking version of LiDAR Compressor™ software. The new version of the MrSID format (MG4) supports LiDAR compression. We released a plug-in for using MG4 in ArcGIS 3D Analyst last October and unveiled our own MG4 Decode tool for decoding MG4 back out to LAS or ASCII text format earlier this year, but we’ve obviously been just as eager to see third parties use the SDK to integrate MG4 support into their own products.

Late last year, Merrick & Company and Global Mapper Software announced support for MG4 in their products, MARS® (Merrick Advanced Remote Sensing) software and Global Mapper 11.01. We were very excited about those early integrations.

Last week another important integration of the MG4 technology was announced, this time by Overwatch, an operating unit of Textron Systems, a provider of imagery and geospatial solutions to Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the intelligence and forestry communities. Overwatch is the maker of LIDAR Analyst, a plug-in for ArcGIS and ERDAS IMAGINE that provides tools for automatically extracting bare earth terrain, 3D buildings, trees and forests, contour lines, and terrain characteristics.

LIDAR Analyst is used for feature extraction by user groups requiring high-resolution terrain information. With the release of version 5.0, LIDAR Analyst customers will be able to process LiDAR data that has been compressed using LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor.

We’re excited because, as our director of marketing Jon notes, our customers in the Department of Defense and elsewhere have frequently requested MG4 support in LIDAR Analyst, and this integration will provide them with the ability to efficiently compress their LiDAR files and use them in one of their most commonly used applications.

Overwatch is excited because, according to LIDAR Analyst’s product manager Matt Morris, “The MrSID format is best in class for raster imagery compression and we are quite pleased with LizardTech’s specific innovations in point cloud compression.”

We’re blushing, but it’s true.