Intergraph has released an updated SDK that will increase flexibility and performance for the Enhanced Compressed Wavelet (ECW) and ISO JPEG 2000 image compression formats.
The latest version of the ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK, Version 5, includes support for ECW Version 3, 16-bit support and a re-architected compression algorithm for vastly improved performance.
ECW and JPEG 2000 serve as de facto standards adopted by GIS, CAD and remote sensing packages worldwide. Serving imagery as ECW files minimises the impact of managing and distributing large image data, as it can compress imagery down to five percent of its original size, while preserving image quality. ISO-certified JPEG 2000 is a numerically lossless compressed image format commonly used for geospatial imagery.
The ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK has produced stable, high-quality commercial applications for over 10 years. ECW support is virtually ubiquitous across leading geospatial and CAD software packages, including those from Intergraph, as well as software from AutoDesk, Blue Marble, CadCorp, ENVI, ESRI ArcGIS, Geomatica, LizardTech, GeoExpress, FalconView, Global Mapper, MapInfo, Manifold System, MicroStation, and Smallworld. ECW is also supported by open source geospatial packages such as GDAL, QGIS, GeoServer and MapServer.