We’re pretty pumped. Why? Well, we always are — that’s how we make such great software. But in particular, our white paper on the MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) technology has been republished by the good folks at GeoPlace.com, so that word about the format’s new features — support for multispectral imagery, alpha band transparency, support for LiDAR point cloud data and improved mosaics — can reach an even wider audience of users.

If you haven’t seen it yet we encourage you to read it and learn about the capabilities of LizardTech’s latest version of the format that first made it possible for geospatial professionals to use high resolution imagery in their applications and that continues to evolve with advancements in geospatial imaging.

Visit GeoPlace.com, look for the section “White Papers” in the main column on the home page, and click Download now.

LizardTech’s business is not only about compression ratios and lossless quality; it’s about making our customers’ jobs easier by providing the best GIS solutions around while still taking into account their current operations. While much of our team’s time during the last ten months has been spent building and launching LizardTech’s GeoExpress® and Express Server® software products, we’ve also worked (and continue to work) hard to ensure that these products remain compatible with other commonly used GIS software.

Based on your feedback, we know many of you manage workflows that include one or more pieces of Esri software and it is increasingly important for both LizardTech and Esri technologies to integrate seamlessly together. Supported file formats allow projects to run smoothly and make sharing data faster and more efficient. Everyone wins.

To that end, LizardTech has recently made available a free plug-in for interoperability between our Express Server and Esri’s server product, ArcIMS. Express Server 7 came on the scene in July offering exciting features such as added support for raster images encoded to MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) format and the option to install as a 64-bit application. Now when used together, Express Server makes viewing images via ArcIMS up to 25 times faster!

We also offer free plug-ins that add support for MG4 raster data files in Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop version 9.3.1 and 10. Now Esri’s Arc users can harness the benefits of the new MG4 files that GeoExpress 8 produces, including support for compressing hyperspectral data allowing users to compress up to 255 bands of geospatial data.

You can download the plug-ins for ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10 here.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future releases, so thank you, and keep it coming!

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!