About

IIPImage is an Open Source light-weight streaming client-server system for the web-based viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be bandwidth and memory efficient and usable even over a slow internet connection. The system can handle both 8 and 16 bit images, CIELAB colorimetric images and scientific imagery such as multispectral images. The fast streaming is tile-based meaning the client only needs to download the portion of the whole image that is visible on the screen of the user at their current viewing resolution and not the entire image. This makes it possible to view, navigate and zoom in real-time around multi-gigapixel size images that would be impossible to download and manipulate on the local machine. It also makes the system very scalable as the number of image tile downloads will remain the same regardless of the size of the source image. In addition, to reduce the bandwidth necessary even further, the tiles sent back are dynamically JPEG compressed with a level of compression that can be optimized for the available bandwidth by the client.

In order for the system to be as efficient as possible, the images are stored in the multi-resolution TIFF tiled pyramidal format. This allows the server to extract regions of the full image at different resolutions very quickly with little processing overhead. Image of several gigapixels in size can be stored on a central server and viewed by many different users without the need to download large amounts of data.

Features

• Fast lightweight Fast CGI server module that can be embedded in most web servers (Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, MyServer etc)
• Several clients available - Ajax, flash, java applet etc
• Instant dynamic generation of JPEG overviews or details at any resolution
• Allows easy viewing of extremely large images (gigapixel size) with no significant memory requirements
• Standard TIFF-based image format that can be read by many image processing tools (Photoshop, GIMP, VIPS etc)
• 8 or 16 bits per channel image handling
• Greyscale, sRGB and CIE L*a*b* colour spaces
• Multispectral imaging
• Image blending
• Panoramic 3D object image sequences
• Secure image distribution: only JPEG-compressed views of the image are sent to the client. The full-resolution image does not need to be accessible
• Example uses: high resolution museum images, scientific imaging, geographical information systems, medical imaging etc.
• Upcoming Features: JPEG2000 support!