| Filename extension |
.ecw |
|---|---|
| Developed by | Hexagon Geospatial |
| Initial release | 1998 |
| Latest release | ECW v3 - ECW/JP2 SDK v5.3 June 14, 2016 |
| Type of format | Image file format |
| Website | http://www.hexagongeospatial.com/ |
ECW (Enhanced Compression Wavelet) is a proprietary wavelet compression image format used for aerial photography and satellite imagery. It was developed by Earth Resource Mapping, which is now owned by Intergraph, part of Hexagon AB.[1] It is a lossy compression format for images.
In 1998 Earth Resource Mapping Ltd in Perth, Western Australia company founder Stuart Nixon (founder of Nearmap) and two software developers Simon Cope and Mark Sheridan were researching rapid delivery of terabyte sized images over the internet using inexpensive server technology. The outcome of that research was two products, Image Web Server (IWS) and ECW. ECW enables discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) and inverse-DWT operations to be performed quickly on large images while using a relatively small amount of memory.[2] Related (now expired) patents included US 6201897 and US 6442298 for ECW and US 6633688 for IWS. These patents were obtained by ERDAS Inc. through the acquisition of Earth Resource Mapping on May 21, 2007.[3][4] Indirectly Hexagon AB became owner of these patents because they acquired Leica Geosystems in 2005 who had acquired ERDAS Inc in 2001.[5]
After JPEG2000 became an image standard, ER Mapper added tools to read and write JPEG2000 data into the ECW SDK to form the ECW JPEG2000 SDK. After subsequent purchase by ERDAS (themselves subsequently merged into Intergraph), the software development kit was renamed to the ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK. v5 of the SDK was released on 2 July 2013.