Enhanced Compressed Wavelet
Enhanced Compressed Wavelet , also known as Enhanced Compression Wavelet , or ECW for short , is a proprietary file format for the lossy storage of very large raster graphics . It is mainly used in the GIS area.
ECW is similar to the JPEG 2000 format and was developed by Earth Resource Mapping . It has the advantage that applications do not have to keep the entire raster graphic in the main memory for display , but only the area that is currently displayed. This allows very large amounts of images, such as. B. arise in astronomical images, satellite image creation or orthophotography, are highly compressed with good image quality and can also be used on commercially available PCs . The rights to the format looks for a stopover at Leica Geosystems , the company Intergraph held.
Files in ECW format usually have the filename extension “ .ecw ”.
Applications
ECW is supported by leading GIS solutions in the professional and semi-professional area, including ArcGIS / ArcView , Global Mapper , Intergraph GeoMedia , FalconView , MapWindow GIS , gvSIG , QuoVadis , OziExplorer , QGIS .
For the ECW as a graphic format, there are plug-ins for e.g. B. Adobe Photoshop , Corel PaintShop Pro , AutoCAD , IrfanView , ACDSee and others, also slim viewers such as XnView process the format. The ECW-based streaming protocol ECWP was created for use in networks or on the Internet .