[gdal-dev] NITF format for GDAL?

[Frank Warmerdam]

Simon Perkins wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> NITF (National Imagery Transmission Format) is the format preferred by US
> intelligence agencies (amongst others) for multispectral images. It supports a
> very wide range of types, image layouts, etc, as well as georegistration
> information, and seems like it would be a good format for GDAL to support. In
> fact we've recently switched to using GDAL in some of our image analysis
> software, and supporting NITF is pretty much essential for us. Having looked
> around we haven't found any good freely available code for reading and writing
> NITF, versions 2.0 and 2.1, so we've developed some code in house for reading
> (but not writing) a sizeable subset of NITF files.
> 
> I'd be happy to write a GDAL wrapper for our NITF reading code if Frank thinks
> that's a reasonable plan. Alternatively if someone has pointers to a freely
> available and fully featured NITF library, I'd be happy to assist with importing
> that into GDAL. I wrote the current FITS driver for GDAL so I'm familiar with
> the general nitty-gritty.

Simon,

I have done an interoperability project as part of OGC where UMN MapServer
served NITF imagery using GDAL. This was accomplished using the OGDI gateway
in GDAL, as OGDI has pretty good support for various RPF products.

That said, the OGDI support doesn't really work for individual NITF files,
only for properly formatted product trees (ie. CIB, CADRG, etc).

It would be nice to have more direct read support that can operate on
individual files in GDAL. You are welcome to incorporate your NITF support
assuming it will be able to be built on different platforms reasonably well.

I would also note that OSSIM (www.ossim.org) includes various bits of RPF/NITF
reading code, as does the venerable NIMA MUSE product. Also, several years
ago I developed NITF reading and writing support at PCI, so I have some
familiarity with the format.

Best regards,

-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at p...
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent