ecw

ECW (Enhanced Compression Wavelet) is a proprietary wavelet compression image format optimized for aerial and satellite imagery. It was developed by Earth Resource Mapping, and is now owned by ERDAS, which is owned by Intergraph. The lossy compression format efficiently compresses very large images with fine alternating contrast. In 1998 ER Mapper, Ltd (Perth Australia) company founder Stuart Nixon, and two software developers Simon Cope and Mark Sheridan were researching rapid delivery of terabyte sized images over the internet using inexpensive server technology. The outcome of that research was two products, Image Web Server (IWS) and ECW. ECW represented a fundamental mathematical breakthrough enabling Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) and inverse-DWT operations to be performed on very large images very quickly, while only using a tiny amount of RAM. For ECW patents, see US 6201897  and US 6442298 . For IWS patent, see US 6633688 . These patents were assigned to ERDAS (under a...