HFA:

The ERDAS Imagine Image format is the raster data format used with the ERDAS Imagine software product line. Typical imagery includes satellite data as well as land coverages.

ECW:

Enhanced Compressed Wavelet (ECW) is an open standard image technology to compress images with higher quality and in less time than other formats. The ECW compressed image format is the industry standard for compressing and using very large

images. ECW is used by a wide range of GIS, CAD, imaging, office and web applications under Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, HP/UX and Pocket PC.

Limitations:

Returns only as eight bit image data.

JP2ECW:

              The high-performance ECW JPEG 2000 SDK allows you to add read and compress capabilities for large ECW and JPEG 2000 images

to your applications. The JPEG 2000 format is a new ISO standard image format.

EHdr:

Limitations:

.clr color table files are read, but not written.

GTiff:

“GeoTIF” refers to TIFF files which have geographic (or cartographic) data embedded as tags within the TIFF file. The geographic data can then be used to position the image in the correct location and geometry on the screen of a geographic information display.

GMT:

GMT is an open source collection of ~60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and producing Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots via contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views.

Limitations:

NetCDF does not have an unsigned byte data type, so 8 bit rasters will generally need to be converted to Int16 for export to GMT.

GIF:

Gif files always appear as having one colormapped eight bit band.

Limitations:

If written from a file that is not colormapped, a default greyscale colormap is generated.

HDF4:

At its lowest level, HDF is a physical file format for storing scientific data. At its highest level, HDF is a collection of utilities and applications for manipulating, viewing, and analyzing data in HDF files. Between these levels, HDF is a software library that provides high-level APIs and a low-level data interface.

HDF5:

HDF5 is a general purpose library and file format for storing scientific data.

Limitations:

No Metadata are read from the HDF5 files.

RST:

The Idrisi .rst file format is the raster data format used with Clark Labs' Idrisi software product line (a geographic information and image processing software system).

ILWIS:

Limitations:

Support for geo-referencing transform is limited to north-oriented GeoRefCorner only. Support is limited to: Projection type of Projection and Lat/Lon type that are defined in .csy file, the rest of pre-defined projection types are ignored.

IDA:

IDA images are the image format of WinDisp 4. The files are always one band only of 8bit data. IDA files often have the extension .img though that is not required.

Limitations:

Projection and georeferencing information is read though some projections (ie. Meteosat, and Hammer-Aitoff) are not supported. When writing IDA files the projection must have a false easting and false northing of zero. The support coordinate systems in IDA are Geographic, Lambert Conformal Conic, Lambert Azimuth Equal Area, Albers Equal-Area Conic and Goodes Homolosine.

JDEM:

The JDEM .mem file format is a file format used by the Japanese Geographical Survey Institute to provide gridded elevation data.

JPEG:

JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name

of the committee that wrote the standard. 

Limitations:

Memory datasets should support for most kinds of auxilary information including metadata, coordinate systems, georeferencing, GCPs, color interpretation, nodata, color tables and all pixel data types.

JP2KAK:

JPEG2000 is a relatively new format for storing imagery in a very highly compressed yet high quality manner, similar to the ECW and MrSID formats.

Levellar:

Leveller was designed to provide full editing capabilities for heightfields. What the heightfield winds up being used for, that's up to you. Terrain is one example, bumpmaps another. A heightfield is simple: it's a set of numbers arranged so that they form a two-dimensional grid, like a bitmap, except each number represents a ground elevation instead of a color. Most of the stress over heightfields comes from confusing them with bitmaps.