MRF for large images

MRF for large images. Gary McGath. Mad File Format Science Blog. January 21, 2016.
NASA, Esri speed delivery of cloud-based imagery data. Patrick Marshall. GCN. Jan 20, 2016.
     NASA and Esri are releasing to the public a jointly developed raster file format and a compression algorithm designed to deliver large volumes of image data from cloud storage.  The format, called MRF (Meta Raster Format) together with a patented compression algorithm called LERC, can deliver online  images ten to fifteen times faster than JPEG2000. The MRF format breaks files into three parts which can be cached separately. The metadata files can be stored those locally so users can "examine data on file contents and download the data-heavy portions only when needed". This would help to minimize the number of files that are transferred. The compression allows users to get faster performance, lower storage requirements, and they estimate the cloud storage costs would be about one-third as much as traditional file-based enterprise storage. An implementation of MRF from NASA is available on GitHub and an implementation of LERC is on GitHub from Esri.

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