New open image format

[jcupitt at gmail.com]

On 26 June 2013 13:39, Dr. M. Weihrauch <weihrauch at vsco.net> wrote:
> Now I would like to define an image format for his company that would be
> completely open for openslide.

I'm not a slide imaging person at all, but my 2p from working on large
image projects would be:

I've used tiled-pyramidal-jpeg-tiff with success in various projects.
To adapt that old quote, tiff is the worst image file format ever
invented, except for all the other image file formats. It's
(relatively) simple, fast, well understood, and well supported. Code
that can read and write TIFF and JPEG will be around for ever, making
it a good choice for an archive format. It's a shame you can't write
to more than one layer at once with libtiff.

Wavelet systems like jp2k offer marginally better compression, but I
wonder if it's really worth the pain. jp2k adoption has taken years
because the benefits are not very dramatic. I agree that good high-bit
depth support is very nice.

DICOM is the only image file format which is more complicated and more
poorly-defined than TIFF :-( Perhaps I'm being unfair, I have to work
with PET scanners, sorry Mathieu.

I can also see that manufacturers might want to delay final strip
layout. For them, some sort of custom format seems the only way to go.

John