LizardTech attempts to fork the GeoJP2 market
I would like to bring to your attention an issue that has really bothered me
the last few days. It’s a story about image compression. In my industry (GIS,
or Geographic Information Systems), images are one type of data that is very
important. We use aerial photographs of the landscape to collect data and
for referencing other data. The problem with imagery is that it is big, as in too
large to send over the wire, and it must be compressed in some way to allow
software applications to use it.
A leader in the image compression market over the past few years has been a
company called LizardTech. They were
the first company to widely distribute and market a set of image compression
technologies called wavelet compression. Wavelet compression is a more advanced
compression technique than is typically used for compressing images.
Here is a quick primer on image compression. Imagine an image as a set of cells,
much like a sheet of bubble wrap. Each of the bubbles contains a value (your
data, actually), and uncompressed, each bubble of the bubblewrap is full of air (data).
A compression algorithm goes around and pops all of the bubbles that contain the
same (or similar) values, and then it records what the values were and where
they were. Now the size of the entire sheet of bubblewrap is
much smaller than its original. You can then send it over the wire, save it on a disk, etc.
and the physical size of the bubblewrap takes up much less volume than it did before.
Now, when you want to read it again, you go to your de-compression algorithm and ask
which cells in the bubblewrap were popped and what their value was when they
were popped. It then reconstructs the image in its original form.
Again, this is a very simplistic (and probably flawed) analogy of
what is going on, but it gets the point across.
LizardTech’s technology is this wavelet compression stuff. If you go do a google
search for it, you’ll find lots of academic articles about how it works, what
math is used, and examples of images that have been compressed differently. What
they did was not new or novel (like Microsoft copying Macintosh for Windows), but
they marketed it well and aggressively. Big GIS vendors like ESRI and Leica/ERDAS
started incorporating LizardTech’s technology into their software, which was
positioned much like a drug dealer who gives you free samples at the beginning. You could
do small images, but if want more, you have to pay. A lot. To both read and
write the images.
So LizardTech went on like this for about three years. No one was in their market
space and they trounced along making gobs of money from private and government
organizations. They did show, however, that they learned a thing or two from ESRI.
ESRI cemented its dominant market position by understanding that it is governments
that can afford to generate all of the valuable GIS data. This is because it is
extremely difficult for an organization to recover the costs of actually collecting
the data. What ESRI did was basically give the software away to governments so that
they data they were making would end up being distributed in ESRI formats. Pushback
in the form of GRASS and others came too late once all of the momentum was moving
ESRI’s direction. For the past ten years or so, almost all of the data from
government agencies has been in ESRI formats. Slowly, this is starting to move in
the direction of open formats, but the transition has been long and treacherous.
LizardTech has done the same thing, but a technology (and a standard) has come
along to disrupt their plans for global domination. That technology is called
JPEG 2000. On top of that, a couple of their former employees started their
own company called Mapping Science to market JPEG 2000 technologies for the GIS
market. LizardTech didn’t like that too much, and they (recently) sued them out of existence. They
did this because they want to own the geospatial imagery market. They are
following the lead of companies like Microsoft in that they are trying to own
the standard. Microsoft has owned the standard operating system for years,
have profited from it greatly and bullied anyone who tried to get into their space
with lawsuits, threats, and extortion. LizardTech is just following the leader here.
Even though Beta was a better format than VHS, VHS won because it had cheaper
hardware and the movie studios pushed out more product for VHS. If government
agencies like USDA and USGS continue to push out MrSID data files because they
got the technology on the cheap, they are dooming us to an inferior and closed
format. As it stands now, you have to pay $600 to LizardTech for software to even
read their data. In my opinion, this is unacceptable.
If you work for a government agency and you develop GIS data for public use, please
ensure that the data you provide to the public is in an open format. Even
if this format is a bit harder to use, the hidden cost that is passed on to your
users is much greater.