New multi Gigapixel image available

This one has 13 real Gigapixels and detail is impressive. It is available through a Zoomify interface.
It looks like we really need BigTIFF because of file size.

Release of very large Hubble image

NASA has released a very large image with dimensions 29566 X 14321.
Here is a the link to the page.

It opens quite well in VLIV (prefer the tiff version).

Fast image processing

Another side effect of using tiles for very large images is that , as you only load what is visible on the screen, you can apply special effect to a very small subset of the complete image, while maintaining real time.

A simple filter can be inverting the colors of the image, or displaying only the red component of the image.

Some filters that deal with multiple pixels are not easily applicable to single tiles, for example blurring would require data from adjacent tile maybe not in memory.

This filter could be easily implemented in VLIV by small plugins, just like Photoshop plugins.
It may even be possible to use already written plugins as the Photoshop plugin API is widely used and documented.

Virtual Very Large Images

While very large image typically waste a large amount of Hard Disk space, there is a category of very large images that are Virtual, that is computed on the fly.

The most common type of this is Fractal images. At a given resolution (zoom level) and position, you can get the tile image by computation.

Other that come to my mind are :

• Algorithmic images, such as an image that displays all possible 8 bits RGB colors.
• An image that displays all characters from the Unicode table. Each character can be made to fit one tile and rendered on the fly as it is needed.
• Rasterized images from vectorial description.
  

The Virtual Microscope

I have found another source for Very Large Images (or relatively large), NASA's funded project The Virtual Microscope.

It provides a large set of images, obtained through various microscopy methods, such as SEM.
The application is written in Java, with a nice small set of features (and an ugly look). The project images are delivered as Jars (aka Zip files), with subresolutions in subfolders, and individual tiles as single files. I have no idea why they did not use pyramidal TIFFs.

I do not know the data license, so I will not post VLIV images created from theirs, but it is easy to convert the Jars to single TIFFs suitable for VLIV.