Random questions about GDAL file formats

[Simon Perkins]

Hi,

(1) For a while I've been looking for a non-proprietary image format
that supports multi-spectral imagery in a standard way. In theory TIFF
would seem like a good candidate since it allows the samplesPerPixel tag
to be set to an aribtrary number. I think GDAL supports this (from
looking at the source code - haven't tried it yet), but I have yet to
find any other packages, including GIS / image processing systems that
recognize this tag. Does anyone know which standard image processing/GIS
packages support multispectral TIFF? Or is there some other
non-proprietary multispectral format that is more widely understood?
Multispectral PNG anyone?

(2) When using TIFF with GDAL, what compression is used as standard? Is
there any way of adjusting this?

(3) I've written a couple of remote-sensing image applications that use
FITS as a multispectral file format. FITS is really an astronomy format,
but it's simple, non-proprietary, reasonably easy to find tools for, and
supports multispectral images as standard. I'd like to start using GDAL
to support more standard formats, but I'd also like to preserve support
for FITS for backward compatibility. Would anyone be interested in a
GDAL driver for FITS based on the standard cfitsio library?


Cheers,

Sy