ImageSTOR provides powerful tools for compressing, storing, managing and efficiently using your valuable spatial imagery. Once images are placed in an ImageSTOR database, it becomes a central repository from which your image assets can be easily located, explored, and used in your GIS projects. Through advanced image compression and dramatic speed improvements ImageSTOR will greatly improve the efficiency of your workflow.

Image Database

ImageSTOR is not just a compression scheme - it is a complete database system for managing large amounts of raster data. Based on a custom-built database engine, it enables data access & retrieval much faster than the usual file system, improves security and provides many additional features: advanced image caching, better multiuser access, network traffic optimization...

Users may also choose to use their existing database system (Oracle, IBM DB2, MS SQL Server...) for image storage through ODBC technology. This enables centralized storage of all your spatial data: vectors, attributes and raster data sets. Database system enables flexible management of your image assets: images can be added, replaced, deleted or regrouped according to specific project requirements, which is not possible with simple file-based compression schemes.

Compressed, Multiresolution Image Format

Images are stored in multiresolution format that enables instantaneous display of any required part of the image, in any resolution; this feature, combined with efficient compression, results in dramatic speed improvements in display redraw, zoom and pan operations. Images are displayed in real-time regardless of their number and size, even on slower desktop systems or field laptop computers. Speed improvement is even greater when ImageSTOR is used in network environments with many users - multiresolution format and data compression greatly reduce the network traffic.

Image data is efficiently compressed. Several compression methods are provided, from lossless (no image data is lost, reconstruction is perfect) to state-of-the-art wavelet compression. This greatly reduces required storage space (compression ratios are up to 30:1), improves system responsiveness and enables simple image transfer: one small, compact database (fast enough to be used directly from CDROM) instead of many image files.

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