New open image format

[Dr. M. Weihrauch]

Dear openslide-community:

Yesterday I talked to a German microscope-expert, who builds a new
microscope-scanner system with his company to target the
"low-budget"-institutions (which cannot easily afford €120.000 for a
Leica scanner e. g.). His machine will go to 83-100x, which would be
especially great for me as a hematologist, who needs to do cytology. He
is great on the technical part and the scanner prototype is almost done.
He does not know much about the software side and I talked to him that
my company can handle that for him.

Now I would like to define an image format for his company that would be
completely open for openslide. I learnt a lot about image processing /
pyramids and tiles from Benjamin and John, but I dont understand the
inside-concept of e. g. SVS, SCN, etc completely.

What I believe should be the requirements:

1. The image format should be open (non-proprietary)
2. One file contains the complete image (pyramid) - so not as Zeiss, etc
did it in folders
3. All zoom-levels should be included to give the user a very fast
microscopy-experience (not like SVS with every 2nd zoom-level)

My questions:

1. What is the format of choice? TIF? What is the format inside? JPEG?
JPEG2000?
2. Is it necessary to pretile the 256x256 tiles and how are they
accessed "from the outside"?
3. If there is a complete image pyramid inside - comparable to the
deepzoom-directory structure, do we need an extra thumbnail?
4. Is there already a free, open, well-documented format that we could
tap into?

I appreciate any suggestions.

Martin