NITF format for GDAL?

[Simon Perkins]

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.

Any comments welcome,

Simon