IIPImage JPEG2000: Free Software for Zoomable High Resolution Online Images

klokan@klokan.cz (Klokan Petr Přidal) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:33:00 +0000

As a technical manager of the OldMapsOnline.org project I am very pleased to post to this blog a note about our results:

Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project are proud to announce the release of a new version of the open-source IIPImage server software (http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/).

The freely available IIPImage software can be used for stunning online presentations of scanned documents, paintings, maps, books, newspapers, photographs or other high-resolution images on the web directly from JPEG2000 or TIFF files.

The new version allows direct publishing from JPEG2000 images to a wide variety of different client technologies based on AJAX, Adobe Flash or Silverlight. These include popular pan&zoom viewers based on Zoomify or Seadragon technology (including the Seadragon AJAX viewer and the Seadragon iPhone application) as well as it's own AJAX enabled IIPMooViewer. The documents provided by IIPImage can be displayed in any web browser and on a number of platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux or iPhone.

The software is primarily targeted at institutions who operate their own server connected to the Internet and who want to publish large collections of digital images directly from JPEG2000 or
TIFF files.

Institutions who does not have the necessary infrastructure can follow our alternative tutorial at http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/ on how to achieve the same using standard web hosting and free software.

IIPImage is a light-weight client-server system for fast and efficient online viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be bandwidth and memory efficient and usable over a slow Internet connection even on gigapixel sized images.
It is available for free, under an open source license (GNU GPL). We recommend installing
the software on a Linux (or other UNIX) server. We have prepared an easy to install binary package for Debian and Ubuntu with step-by-step instructions for installation.

JPEG2000 support has been implemented using the Kakadu library, which provides one of the fastest implementations of the JPEG2000 ISO standard and is redistributable for non-commercial use.

The enhancement of IIPImage was developed by the Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project with the support of grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

The Moravian Library (http://www.mzk.cz/), based in Brno, Czech Republic, is a research institution and a legal deposit library. Project OldMapsOnline.org (http://www.oldmapsonline.org/) is a research project of the Moravian Library that aims to develop software to assist in the management, manipulation and visualisation of historical map collections on the web. The project team is designing online tools for publishing, collaborative georeferencing, annotation, 3D visualisation, accuracy analysis and geometadata specification for old maps.

For more information and for the IIPImage JPEG2000 software, see http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/.

iPhone and NOAA BSB, USGS DRG and custom maps

klokan@klokan.cz (Klokan Petr Přidal) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:10:00 +0000

iPhone supports displaying of Google Maps tiles very well by standard Maps.app application. A man can zoom and look around just by finger gestures.

Behind the user interface the Maps.app is loading tiles from Google server and storing them in to SQLite cache file.
Some people proved that you can prepare your own SQLite cache with custom maps and let it use by Maps.app on iPhone.

Then you have a map of your choice and this map is even available off-line, so your iPhone don't need to use internet connection to get the tiles as they are stored in the disk of the phone already.

Such approach was documented for Google Sky tiles for example: http://www.dailyack.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

Nowadays there is even a GUI application for iPhone allowing you to switch prepared maps:
http://code.google.com/p/iphoneofflinemap/

Unfortunatelly the maps are usually prepared in advance on a computer from half legal map sources by software like Global Map Download Tool.

But I don't see a problem to prepare tiles from legally owned maps like NOAA BSB navy charts or USGS DRG topo maps.

Jerry Morrison from Google Inc. in his presentation "Scaling Google Maps from the Big Screen Down to Mobile Phones" mentioned that iPhone uses tiles with size 64x64px, MapTiler should be able to generate such tiles quite well.

I was thinking maybe somebody can push my MapTiler application to generates tiles directly into the SQLite cache database for simple upload into iPhone. Anybody interested?

P.S.
There is now way how to design a 100% web-based map application with iPhone Web Touch API.

Klokan Technologies GmbH

IIPImage JPEG2000: Free Software for Zoomable High Resolution Online Images

iPhone and NOAA BSB, USGS DRG and custom maps