LizardTech
Encyclopedia
LizardTech is a geospatial
software company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, notable for transferring the wavelet
-based MrSID
image encoding and viewing technology from initial development by the U.S. government to the geospatial market.
LizardTech's products enable users to compress, manipulate, and distribute high-resolution
geospatial data such as aerial
, satellite imagery
and LiDAR
data. The company is a division of Celartem Inc. (Hercules: 4330), and has offices in Tokyo
and London
. Its sister company, Extensis
, is based in Portland
, Oregon
.
LizardTech was founded in 1992 to commercialize the MrSID technology and file format
originally developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
in New Mexico
. The name of the company is an homage to the lizard
s of the New Mexican desert. Representatives of LizardTech have been known to give out plastic lizards at board meetings as a way of promoting the company.
and Dr. Vance Faber
formed LizardTech to move the MrSID
(Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database) technology from LANL, where it was developed for government applications, into the wider arena of private industry. They recruited Dr. Jim White from LANL and Peter Crook from the private sector to drive the first commercial wavelet-based image compression
product, LizardTech's early MrSID GeoEncoder software (later renamed GeoExpress) was designed specifically for geospatial professionals working with massive sets of aerial and satellite imagery.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS)
was one of the early adaptors, and the National Information Mapping Agency (now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
) and many other government agencies have since embraced the MrSID format. Quickly adopted by the geospatial community, MrSID became the de facto standard for creating, viewing and publishing geospatial imagery. It is now supported by more than 300 GIS applications including those of ESRI
, ERDAS (ERDAS IMAGINE
), Autodesk
and Intergraph
.
In the mid-1990s, LizardTech moved its headquarters to Seattle, Washington, where it was identified in 1998 as the Washington Software Alliance
’s Most Promising New Company.
In 2000, still a privately owned company funded by venture capital
, LizardTech released its Content Server software product (later renamed Express Server), a server
add-on that leveraged efficiencies in wavelet-based image compression to "stream" image data over networks
on an as-needed basis as users navigated imagery.
With the slow but steady emergence of another wavelet-based compression technology, the powerful but complex JPEG 2000
ISO standard (ISO/IEC 15444-1:2000), LizardTech launched an aggressive R&D program to incorporate JPEG 2000 into its software products and became experts in JPEG 2000 compression for the geospatial industry. A by-product of this research was a gradual shift toward more use of open source tools and software and cooperation with the open source development community.
Deal and Faber left LizardTech in 2002. In 2003 the company was purchased by Celartem Inc., a Tokyo-based imaging technology company. The same year, LizardTech joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
.
In 2005 LizardTech began adding tools to its basic compression product that geospatial users would find particularly useful from a workflow standpoint, such as reprojection
, area-of-interest encoding and color balancing
. That year the company also released Spatial Express, an API
and set of tools for storing and retrieving wavelet-compressed imagery in an Oracle
database
.
From 2006 onward, development focused on interoperability of LizardTech's products with each other and with the broader geospatial ecosystem. LizardTech rolled out its Express Suite -- all three of its geospatial products together—in 2007. The 2008 release of GeoExpress 7 completed the work of making GeoExpress, Spatial Express and Express Server all interoperate fully for the first time.
In 2000 LizardTech negotiated exclusive rights to commercially develop and market the DjVu technology
developed at AT&T Laboratories
in 1996. The company hoped to widen its market from raster
imaging only (mainly in the geospatial arena) to include the complex raster and vector
imaging necessary in the growing document imaging
industry. LizardTech developed the Document Express enterprise and professional level products in the years 2000–2006. DjVu-based solutions were most successful in Asia
, and in 2007 Celartem began transferring all aspects of DjVu development to its Tokyo headquarters. Celartem USA now handles all aspects of DjVu marketing, sales and support in the U.S.
The MrSID image format continues to be the standard compressed image format for geospatial applications and is supported in virtually all GIS
software products. It is required as a delivery format by the USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program
(NAIP). Interest in JPEG 2000 has grown slowly but steadily as users become aware of the standard's capabilities for carrying georeferencing and other XML
-based metadata
via the Geography Markup Language (GML)
, as well as for fine-tuning compression parameters for particular workflows.
Geospatial
Geospatial analysis is an approach to applying statistical analysis and other informational techniques to geographically based data. Such analysis employs spatial software and analytical methods with terrestrial or geographic datasets, including geographic information systems and...
software company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, notable for transferring the wavelet
Wavelet
A wavelet is a wave-like oscillation with an amplitude that starts out at zero, increases, and then decreases back to zero. It can typically be visualized as a "brief oscillation" like one might see recorded by a seismograph or heart monitor. Generally, wavelets are purposefully crafted to have...
-based MrSID
MrSID
-External links:* from LizardTech's website...
image encoding and viewing technology from initial development by the U.S. government to the geospatial market.
LizardTech's products enable users to compress, manipulate, and distribute high-resolution
Image resolution
Image resolution is an umbrella term that describes the detail an image holds. The term applies to raster digital images, film images, and other types of images. Higher resolution means more image detail....
geospatial data such as aerial
Aerial photography
Aerial photography is the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position. The term usually refers to images in which the camera is not supported by a ground-based structure. Cameras may be hand held or mounted, and photographs may be taken by a photographer, triggered remotely or...
, satellite imagery
Satellite imagery
Satellite imagery consists of photographs of Earth or other planets made by means of artificial satellites.- History :The first images from space were taken on sub-orbital flights. The U.S-launched V-2 flight on October 24, 1946 took one image every 1.5 seconds...
and LiDAR
LIDAR
LIDAR is an optical remote sensing technology that can measure the distance to, or other properties of a target by illuminating the target with light, often using pulses from a laser...
data. The company is a division of Celartem Inc. (Hercules: 4330), and has offices in Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
and London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Its sister company, Extensis
Extensis
Extensis is a software company based in Portland, Oregon. Its three main products are Extensis Portfolio, Suitcase Fusion, and Universal Type Server....
, is based in Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
.
LizardTech was founded in 1992 to commercialize the MrSID technology and file format
File format
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...
originally developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
in New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
. The name of the company is an homage to the lizard
Lizard
Lizards are a widespread group of squamate reptiles, with nearly 3800 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica as well as most oceanic island chains...
s of the New Mexican desert. Representatives of LizardTech have been known to give out plastic lizards at board meetings as a way of promoting the company.
History
After working together at Los Alamos, John R "Grizz" DealJohn "Grizz" Robert Deal
John "Grizz" Robert Deal , is the CEO of IX Power, co-founder and former CEO of Hyperion Power Generation.- Personal :...
and Dr. Vance Faber
Vance Faber
Vance Faber is a mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics, applied linear algebra and image processing....
formed LizardTech to move the MrSID
MrSID
-External links:* from LizardTech's website...
(Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database) technology from LANL, where it was developed for government applications, into the wider arena of private industry. They recruited Dr. Jim White from LANL and Peter Crook from the private sector to drive the first commercial wavelet-based image compression
Image compression
The objective of image compression is to reduce irrelevance and redundancy of the image data in order to be able to store or transmit data in an efficient form.- Lossy and lossless compression :...
product, LizardTech's early MrSID GeoEncoder software (later renamed GeoExpress) was designed specifically for geospatial professionals working with massive sets of aerial and satellite imagery.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS)
United States Geological Survey
The United States Geological Survey is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. The organization has four major science disciplines, concerning biology,...
was one of the early adaptors, and the National Information Mapping Agency (now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is an agency of the federal government of the United States with the primary mission of collecting, analyzing and distributing geospatial intelligence in support of national security. NGA was formerly known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency ...
) and many other government agencies have since embraced the MrSID format. Quickly adopted by the geospatial community, MrSID became the de facto standard for creating, viewing and publishing geospatial imagery. It is now supported by more than 300 GIS applications including those of ESRI
ESRI
Esri is a software development and services company providing Geographic Information System software and geodatabase management applications. The headquarters of Esri is in Redlands, California....
, ERDAS (ERDAS IMAGINE
ERDAS IMAGINE
ERDAS IMAGINE is a remote sensing application with raster graphics editor capabilities designed by ERDAS for geospatial applications. The latest version is 2010, version 10.1. ERDAS IMAGINE is aimed primarily at geospatial raster data processing and allows the user to prepare, display and enhance...
), Autodesk
Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...
and Intergraph
Intergraph
Intergraph Corporation is an American software development and services company. It provides enterprise engineering and geospatially powered software to businesses, governments, and organizations around the world. Intergraph operates through two divisions: Process, Power & Marine and Security,...
.
In the mid-1990s, LizardTech moved its headquarters to Seattle, Washington, where it was identified in 1998 as the Washington Software Alliance
Washington Software Alliance
Washington Software Alliance is a prominent technology business association, with approximately 1,000 member companies in Washington state, USA....
’s Most Promising New Company.
In 2000, still a privately owned company funded by venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
, LizardTech released its Content Server software product (later renamed Express Server), a server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
add-on that leveraged efficiencies in wavelet-based image compression to "stream" image data over networks
Computer network
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
on an as-needed basis as users navigated imagery.
With the slow but steady emergence of another wavelet-based compression technology, the powerful but complex JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000 is an image compression standard and coding system. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee in 2000 with the intention of superseding their original discrete cosine transform-based JPEG standard with a newly designed, wavelet-based method...
ISO standard (ISO/IEC 15444-1:2000), LizardTech launched an aggressive R&D program to incorporate JPEG 2000 into its software products and became experts in JPEG 2000 compression for the geospatial industry. A by-product of this research was a gradual shift toward more use of open source tools and software and cooperation with the open source development community.
Deal and Faber left LizardTech in 2002. In 2003 the company was purchased by Celartem Inc., a Tokyo-based imaging technology company. The same year, LizardTech joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Open Geospatial Consortium
The Open Geospatial Consortium , an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 400 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open...
.
In 2005 LizardTech began adding tools to its basic compression product that geospatial users would find particularly useful from a workflow standpoint, such as reprojection
Map projection
A map projection is any method of representing the surface of a sphere or other three-dimensional body on a plane. Map projections are necessary for creating maps. All map projections distort the surface in some fashion...
, area-of-interest encoding and color balancing
Color balance
In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors . An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neutral colors – correctly; hence, the general method is sometimes called gray balance, neutral balance,...
. That year the company also released Spatial Express, an API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
and set of tools for storing and retrieving wavelet-compressed imagery in an Oracle
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
.
From 2006 onward, development focused on interoperability of LizardTech's products with each other and with the broader geospatial ecosystem. LizardTech rolled out its Express Suite -- all three of its geospatial products together—in 2007. The 2008 release of GeoExpress 7 completed the work of making GeoExpress, Spatial Express and Express Server all interoperate fully for the first time.
In 2000 LizardTech negotiated exclusive rights to commercially develop and market the DjVu technology
DjVu
DjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy...
developed at AT&T Laboratories
AT&T Laboratories
AT&T Laboratories, Inc. was the research & development division of AT&T Corporation. It was founded in 1925 as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., following the merger of the research & development divisions of American Telephone & Telegraph and Western Electric.-History:In 1996, most of Bell Labs...
in 1996. The company hoped to widen its market from raster
Raster graphics
In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium...
imaging only (mainly in the geospatial arena) to include the complex raster and vector
Vector graphics
Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...
imaging necessary in the growing document imaging
Document imaging
Document imaging is an information technology category for systems capable of replicating documents commonly used in business. Document imaging systems can take many forms including microfilm, on demand printers, facsimile machines, copiers, multifunction printers, document scanners, computer...
industry. LizardTech developed the Document Express enterprise and professional level products in the years 2000–2006. DjVu-based solutions were most successful in Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
, and in 2007 Celartem began transferring all aspects of DjVu development to its Tokyo headquarters. Celartem USA now handles all aspects of DjVu marketing, sales and support in the U.S.
The MrSID image format continues to be the standard compressed image format for geospatial applications and is supported in virtually all GIS
Geographic Information System
A geographic information system, geographical information science, or geospatial information studies is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data...
software products. It is required as a delivery format by the USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program
National Agriculture Imagery Program
The National Agriculture Imagery Program acquires aerial imagery during the agricultural growing seasons in the continental United States...
(NAIP). Interest in JPEG 2000 has grown slowly but steadily as users become aware of the standard's capabilities for carrying georeferencing and other XML
Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
-based metadata
Geospatial metadata
Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata that is applicable to objects that have an explicit or implicit geographic extent, in other words, are associated with some position on the surface of the Globe...
via the Geography Markup Language (GML)
Geography Markup Language
The Geography Markup Language is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic transactions on the Internet...
, as well as for fine-tuning compression parameters for particular workflows.
Products
LizardTech's Express Suite line of geospatial products combines image manipulation and compression tools with solutions for raster image storage and distribution in standard geospatial formats. The Express Suite products – GeoExpress, Spatial Express and Express Server – were designed to work together and interoperate with many geospatial applications and protocols. LiDAR Compressor is a geospatial application but is not part of the Express Suite line.- GeoExpress
LizardTech's flagship software product is GeoExpress, which originally leveraged the MrSID technology and now also supports the ISO standard JPEG 2000 technology. GeoExpress is used by government agencies, utilities, mapping data providers, state and local municipalities and similar organizations for manipulating and compressing geospatial imagery.
Spatial Express
With the introduction of Spatial Express, LizardTech made it possible to store MrSID and JPEG 2000 images natively in an Oracle Spatial database, not only reducing the storage requirements for geospatial imagery but also making raster data available to users of mapping and other GIS applications in the same way as vector data. The functionality of Spatial Express is accessible through Oracle's GeoRaster API.
- Express Server
LizardTech Express Server, an add-on application for Web servers, was introduced to quickly and efficiently distribute massive datasets of raster imagery in MrSID and JPEG 2000 formats. Express Server can be configured to distribute imagery via open standards such as the OGC's Web Map Service (WMS)Web Map ServiceA Web Map Service is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS database...
protocols; via plug-ins for proprietary applications such as ArcIMS; or via a Web interface for use with standard browsers or customized viewing applications. Express Server was designed to deliver user-defined image data catalogs to any device over any connection. - LiDAR Compressor
LizardTech LiDAR Compressor was released in 2009 to enable users of elevation data to turn point clouds, which can be very large, into MrSID files that retain 100 percent of the quantized raw data at just 25 percent of the file size through lossless compression. The product achieves reduction of LiDAR file sizes by 90 percent or more through lossy compression, in which a higher compression ratio is used to reduce point accuracy and reach a desired file size. LiDAR files compressed to MrSID can be used as resources from which subsequent derivatives can be extracted.
LizardTech and open standards
LizardTech sits on OGC's Technical Committee and has been a chief contributor in extending the capabilities of JPEG 2000 to geospatial applications. The lack of a geospatial metadata standard had meant that applications and viewers may or may not be able to read geospatial metadata in JPEG 2000 files. Together with Galdos Systems, also an OGC member, LizardTech developed a geography markup language (GML) implementation of JPEG 2000 that was ratified by the OGC in February 2006. Called GMLJP2, this implementation furthers the interoperability of JPEG 2000 as a geospatial image format and helps customers disseminate and maximize return on investment from geospatial imagery by providing a consistent, vendor-independent image format.Awards and honors
- The Washington Software Alliance named LizardTech Most Promising New Company in 1998.
- LizardTech received an honorable mention in the Innovation Award category for its Express Suite Family of Products during the Geospatial Leadership Awards ceremony at the 2008 GeoTec Event in OttawaOttawaOttawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
OntarioOntarioOntario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
.
Development rights and patents
LizardTech holds exclusive rights to develop and market the MrSID technology and holds a number of patents.See also
- LizardTech, Inc. v. Earth Resource Mapping, Inc.LizardTech, Inc. v. Earth Resource Mapping, Inc.is a Federal Circuit case. LizardTech sued Earth Resource Mapping for patent infringement related to taking discrete wavelet transforms in their ER Mapper program. The court ruled in ERM's favor, finding that some of the claims were invalid, and that ER Mapper did not infringe the other claims...
, a court case involving a patent licenced to LizardTech.