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NITF Support

The National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) standard was created by the Department of Defense as a means of formatting digital imagery and imagery-related products and exchanging them among members of the intelligence community, the Department of Defense (DOD), and other government departments and agencies. NITF was created partly because government agencies needed a single common image representation that supported certain metadata features and workflows. While it is called an image format, NITF is more precisely described as a file format that wraps one or more image files and their corresponding metadata.

The DSDK supports reading NITF files and includes the following features:

  1. support for image segments with JPEG and JPEG 2000 compression
  2. some support for files containing multiple image segments
  3. some support for TRE data

NOTE:  Text, label, and symbol segment types are not supported.

Important Notes On NITF Compliance in the MrSID SDK

This version of the MrSID SDK follows the following NITF standards:

  1. versions 2.1 (MIL-STD-2500C, Draft April 2004) and 2.0 of the NITF file format for reading
  2. the BIIF Profile (BPJ2K01.00, Draft January 2004) including the J2KLRA TRE

NITF v1.1. files are not supported.

Some of these NITF standards are not yet ratified; future SDK releases will track the evolution of these standards to ensure interoperability.

The architecture of the NITF classes may change in a future release, so as to provide simpler and more efficient access to NITF features such as multiple image segments and TRE data.

The motivated reader may wish to learn more in "Georeferencing of NITF Imagery".

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The NITF Reader