INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: Lizard Tech
Interview with Jon Skiffington
Senior Product Manager
LizardTech
Q: How does LizardTech enable users to manage and share massive geospatial imagery and aerial photography?
A: LizardTech’s “Express Suite” line of geospatial products gives users the tools they need to compress, manipulate, store and distribute their large geospatial datasets. GeoExpress, our flagship product, lets users compress imagery to either the industry standard MrSID format or the ISO standard JPEG 2000 format. Both of these wavelet compression formats can reduce the size of raster imagery by 95 percent or more while retaining visual quality. This makes high resolution aerial and satellite images easier to manage and much faster to view while still giving decisionmakers the accurate information they need.
We also offer two other products in the Express Suite. Spatial Express allows our customers to efficiently store those large raster images in an Oracle Spatial database, so raster imagery can be managed just like any other data. Express Server, our geospatial data distribution application, allows users to serve imagery efficiently to virtually any GIS application, third-party image servers, or even via new methods like JPIP (streaming JPEG 2000).
Q: Who is this “Sid” you keep talking about?
A: Funny you should ask. When I first started at LizardTech we used to play pranks on new receptionists by asking them to page “MrSID.” Needless to say, it elicited quite a bit of laughter in the office.
MrSID stands for Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database, and is our proprietary wavelet compression technology. The latest version is called MrSID Generation 3, or MG3 for short. It supports many advanced features that our older versions did not, including color balancing, reprojection and optimization, and also allows you to compress images losslessly, so all of the original image data is retained, but in a much smaller file.
Q: Can you give us an example of how military and intelligence users are using or could use your products?
A: The MrSID technology has become indispensable for forward deployed warfighters and the people who support them. As image resolution gets higher and higher, and collection times become more frequent, the amount of image data being acquired is staggering. By using MrSID, they’re able to compress those images, move them around their network, and get them into the hands of the decision-makers who need them. The image sizes are reduced so much that they can be transferred just by using a USB drive.
It’s also been beneficial for units that are deployed from overseas. With so much imagery available in MrSID format, now they can look at the areas they’ll be deployed to and become familiar with the areas they’ll be working in before they leave, rather than trying to figure out everything when they first arrive.
Q: What unique benefits to military and intelligence users does your company offer compared with others in the field?
A: For years, we’ve been providing tools to make images easier to work with, so forward deployed warfighters or anyone else working remotely in the field can easily access the data they need to make decisions. The MrSID format is supported in nearly every GIS application, so users can be sure that their images will always be viewable.
Now with our Express Server application, those images can be served even over low-speed connections, so when bandwidth is at a premium you can get your imagery out.
Q: What areas are you working on for the future in meeting military and intelligence needs?
A: While our Express Server is great in low-bandwidth environments, it does suffer when bandwidth is spotty—that is, when you have conditions where links are going up and down constantly. Our customers in the Department of Defense and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have been asking us if we have any ways of helping with this, and we’re excited to do that with the introduction of our latest release of Express Server, version 6.1.
With this version, customers can stream JPEG 2000 files via JPIP. This means that they’ll get an initial view of the image almost instantaneously, but more data will stream in behind the scenes. Now if their connections drop intermittently, they’ll still be able to use the portion of the image they’ve downloaded. Even better, once the connection is restored the data will start streaming again to the client, most of the time without the user even noticing that the connection was dropped. ♦
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