LizardTech

LizardTech, Inc.
Public
Industry Software
Founded Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. (1992)
Headquarters Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Products GeoExpress, Express Server
Number of employees
 30 (August 2008)
Parent Celartem, Inc.
Website http://www.lizardtech.com

LizardTech is a geospatial software company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, notable for transferring the wavelet-based MrSID image encoding and viewing technology from initial development by the U.S. government to the geospatial market.

LizardTech's products enable users to compress, manipulate, and distribute high-resolution geospatial data such as aerial, satellite imagery and LiDAR data. The company is a division of Celartem Inc. (Hercules: 4330), and has offices in Tokyo and London. Its sister company, Extensis, is based in Portland, Oregon.

LizardTech was founded in 1992 to commercialize the MrSID technology and file format originally developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. The name of the company is an homage to the lizards of the New Mexican desert. Representatives of LizardTech have been known to give out plastic lizards at board meetings and at their vendor booth at various conferences as a way of promoting the company.

History

After working together at Los Alamos, John R "Grizz" Deal and Dr. Vance Faber formed LizardTech to move the MrSID (Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database) technology from LANL, where it was developed for government applications, into the wider arena of private industry. They recruited Dr. Jim White from LANL and Peter Crook from the private sector to drive the first commercial wavelet-based image compression product, LizardTech's early MrSID GeoEncoder software (later renamed GeoExpress) was designed specifically for geospatial professionals working with massive sets of aerial and satellite imagery.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) was one of the early adaptors, and the National Information Mapping Agency (now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and many other government agencies have since embraced the MrSID format. It is now supported by more than 300 GIS applications including those of ESRI, ERDAS (ERDAS IMAGINE), Autodesk and Intergraph.

In the mid-1990s, LizardTech moved its headquarters to Seattle, Washington, where it was identified in 1998 as the Washington Software Alliance’s Most Promising New Company.

In 2000, still a privately owned company funded by venture capital, LizardTech released its Content Server software product (later renamed Express Server), a server add-on that leveraged efficiencies in wavelet-based image compression to "stream" image data over networks on an as-needed basis as users navigated imagery.

With the slow but steady emergence of another wavelet-based compression technology, the powerful but complex JPEG 2000 ISO standard (ISO/IEC 15444-1:2000), LizardTech launched an aggressive R&D program to incorporate JPEG 2000 into its software products and became experts in JPEG 2000 compression for the geospatial industry. A by-product of this research was a gradual shift toward more use of open source tools and software and cooperation with the open source development community.

Deal and Faber left LizardTech in 2002. In 2003 the company was purchased by Celartem Inc., a Tokyo-based imaging technology company.[1] The same year, LizardTech joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

In 2005 LizardTech began adding tools to its basic compression product with the aim of supporting geospatial users from a workflow standpoint, such as reprojection, area-of-interest encoding and color balancing. That year the company also released Spatial Express, an API and set of tools for storing and retrieving wavelet-compressed imagery in an Oracle database.

From 2006 onward, development focused on interoperability of LizardTech's products with each other and with the broader geospatial ecosystem. LizardTech rolled out its Express Suite -- all three of its geospatial products together—in 2007. The 2008 release of GeoExpress 7 completed the work of making GeoExpress, Spatial Express and Express Server all interoperate fully for the first time.

In 2000 LizardTech negotiated exclusive rights to commercially develop and market the DjVu technology developed at AT&T Laboratories in 1996. The company hoped to widen its market from raster imaging only (mainly in the geospatial arena) to include the complex raster and vector imaging necessary in the growing document imaging industry. LizardTech developed the Document Express enterprise and professional level products in the years 2000–2006. DjVu-based solutions were most successful in Asia, and in 2007 Celartem began transferring all aspects of DjVu development to its Tokyo headquarters. Celartem USA now handles all aspects of DjVu marketing, sales and support in the U.S.

The MrSID image format continues to be an important compressed image format for geospatial applications and is supported in virtually all GIS software products. It is required as a delivery format by the USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). Interest in JPEG 2000 has grown slowly but steadily as users become aware of the standard's capabilities for carrying georeferencing and other XML-based metadata via the Geography Markup Language (GML), as well as for fine-tuning compression parameters for particular workflows.

Products

LizardTech's Express Suite line of geospatial products combines image manipulation and compression tools with solutions for raster image storage and distribution in standard geospatial formats. The Express Suite products – GeoExpress and Express Server – were designed to work together and interoperate with many geospatial applications and protocols. LiDAR Compressor is a geospatial application but is not part of the Express Suite line.

GeoExpress
LizardTech's flagship software product is GeoExpress, which originally leveraged the MrSID technology and now also supports the ISO standard JPEG 2000 technology. GeoExpress is used by government agencies, utilities, mapping data providers, state and local municipalities and similar organizations for manipulating and compressing geospatial imagery.
Express Server
LizardTech Express Server, an add-on application for Web servers, was introduced to quickly and efficiently distribute massive datasets of raster imagery in MrSID and JPEG 2000 formats. Express Server can be configured to distribute imagery via open standards such as the OGC's Web Map Service (WMS) protocols; via plug-ins for proprietary applications such as ArcIMS; or via a Web interface for use with standard browsers or customized viewing applications. Express Server was designed to deliver user-defined image data catalogs to any device over any connection.
LiDAR Compressor
LizardTech LiDAR Compressor was released in 2009 to enable users of elevation data to turn point clouds, which can be very large, into MrSID files that retain 100 percent of the quantized raw data at just 25 percent of the file size through lossless compression. The product achieves reduction of LiDAR file sizes by 90 percent or more through lossy compression, in which a higher compression ratio is used to reduce point accuracy and reach a desired file size. LiDAR files compressed to MrSID can be used as resources from which subsequent derivatives can be extracted.

LizardTech and open standards

LizardTech sits on OGC's Technical Committee and has been a chief contributor in extending the capabilities of JPEG 2000 to geospatial applications. The lack of a geospatial metadata standard had meant that applications and viewers may or may not be able to read geospatial metadata in JPEG 2000 files. Together with Galdos Systems, also an OGC member, LizardTech developed a geography markup language (GML) implementation of JPEG 2000 that was ratified by the OGC in February 2006. Called GMLJP2, this implementation furthers the interoperability of JPEG 2000 as a geospatial image format and helps customers disseminate and maximize return on investment from geospatial imagery by providing a consistent, vendor-independent image format.

Awards and honors

Development rights and patents

LizardTech holds exclusive rights to develop and market the MrSID technology and holds a number of patents.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Celartem Company History