GeoTIF and ECW support

hi orux.

let me start by thanking you for a great program. i am a heavy gps user (mostly on multimonth mountainbike trips) and just migrating from a windows mobile platform to android. oruxmaps looks like the tool of choice right now.

i really like the multitude of available online maps, it's almost like a pocket mobac :-). however, i was wondering if you were planning better support for offline map formats for future versions. GeoTIF and ECW come to mind, both very well documented and nicely suited for map data. Many of us "heavy users" have huge topographic map libraries in these formats (created mostly with GlobalMapper) and it would be great to just drop them onto an sd card and run away into the wilderness.

i am specifically asking for direct support in oruxmaps, not in some external windows pc conversion tool. today's android devices are powerful enough to decode that stuff on the fly. even if there's a small speed penalty involved compared to your custom and optimized orux map formats, i'd much prefer that to playing conversion jockey and keeping hundreds of gigabytes of map library at home stored in two different formats.

instead of implementing custom map formats directly into oruxmaps, one could also think of an "android local wms/tile server" kind of thingy. it would translate geotif/ecw/jpg&cal/whatever into tiles that oruxmaps could load just as anything else. with a bit of special handling for caching tiles from those sources, we could have best of both worlds: great speed and still no reason to do cumbersome conversions and double map storage beforehand.

greetings from munich...
stefan.

joeuser wrote:hi orux.

let me start by thanking you for a great program. i am a heavy gps user (mostly on multimonth mountainbike trips) and just migrating from a windows mobile platform to android. oruxmaps looks like the tool of choice right now.

i really like the multitude of available online maps, it's almost like a pocket mobac :-). however, i was wondering if you were planning better support for offline map formats for future versions. GeoTIF and ECW come to mind, both very well documented and nicely suited for map data. Many of us "heavy users" have huge topographic map libraries in these formats (created mostly with GlobalMapper) and it would be great to just drop them onto an sd card and run away into the wilderness.

i am specifically asking for direct support in oruxmaps, not in some external windows pc conversion tool. today's android devices are powerful enough to decode that stuff on the fly. even if there's a small speed penalty involved compared to your custom and optimized orux map formats, i'd much prefer that to playing conversion jockey and keeping hundreds of gigabytes of map library at home stored in two different formats.

instead of implementing custom map formats directly into oruxmaps, one could also think of an "android local wms/tile server" kind of thingy. it would translate geotif/ecw/jpg&cal/whatever into tiles that oruxmaps could load just as anything else. with a bit of special handling for caching tiles from those sources, we could have best of both worlds: great speed and still no reason to do cumbersome conversions and double map storage beforehand.

greetings from munich...
stefan.

Hi, stefan;

My first intention when I started OruxMaps, was to use a existing format (ecw, ozf2,...). But there were no libraries for android. GeoTIFF is not suitable for mobile.
When I find adequate resources, I would like to work with the ECW format.

orux

why is geotif not suitable for mobile? it's just packed raster data with embedded calibration info, like anything else. big geotif files (like maps) are internally organized into 256x256 or 512x512 tiles if the creator was in his right mind. this is called a "tiled geotiff" then. reading it really shouldnt be much different from reading png tiles from a google server.

unfortunately, i'm not aware of a ready-to-use java implementation for reading tiled geotiffs. but hey... programming is fun isnt it? sources in C are readily available .

same goes for ECW. format description and example sources in C are readily available. as for a java implementation or support in JAI, i have no idea.

ps, for java implementation of geo image formats, the open source thingy geotools might help a lot.

just thinking... geoserver seems to be an open source java thingy that, besides many other features, reads plenty of raster formats and feeds them as WMS. wouldnt that be exactly the thing we need to make oruxmaps support every map format in existance?

i wonder if it's possible to strip down this monster far enough to run it on a smartphone as local wms with only the features we need.

Hi,

it would be great to have ECW support for Orux maps. I have seen a post on this forum pointing to some ECW libraries for J2SE, probably they should be easily ported to Android.

Since it doesnt look like geotif support is coming anytime soon (sniff), what chance do i have to get them into oruxmaps? OruxMapsDesktop claims to understand that format, but all I get are silly errors, messed up/incomplete calibration points, nothing usable at all. I tried multiple different projections and formats (all come from GlobalMapper).

Has anybody ever successfully converted a geotif? Please enlighten me what parameters you used.

Thanks,
joe.

joeuserX wrote:Since it doesnt look like geotif support is coming anytime soon (sniff), what chance do i have to get them into oruxmaps? OruxMapsDesktop claims to understand that format, but all I get are silly errors, messed up/incomplete calibration points, nothing usable at all. I tried multiple different projections and formats (all come from GlobalMapper).

Has anybody ever successfully converted a geotif? Please enlighten me what parameters you used.

Thanks,
joe.

Hi, joe;

OruxMapsDesktop can read geotiff, if you have jai-imageio tools installed in your jvm.

When you try to calibrate a .tiff map, if OruxMapsDesktop can not understand the projection/datum, will display a message like:

Code:

Error leyendo Geotiff; Datum/Proyección desconocida.
Geotiff file= /home/jose/Escritorio/test/Albuquerque_86/Albuquerque 86 North.tif
0 IFDEntry ==  tag = 256 (ImageWidth) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 11934
1 IFDEntry ==  tag = 257 (ImageLength) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 4129
2 IFDEntry ==  tag = 258 (BitsPerSample) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 8
3 IFDEntry ==  tag = 259 (Compression) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 1
4 IFDEntry ==  tag = 262 (PhotometricInterpretation) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 3
5 IFDEntry ==  tag = 273 (StripOffsets) type = LONG count = 4129 values = 8 11942 23876 35810 47744 59678 71612 83546 95480 107414 119348 131282 143216 155150 167084 179018 190952 202886 214820 226754 238688 250622 262556 274490 286424 298358 310292 322226 334160 346094
6 IFDEntry ==  tag = 274 (Orientation) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 1
7 IFDEntry ==  tag = 277 (SamplesPerPixel) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 1
8 IFDEntry ==  tag = 278 (RowsPerStrip) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 1
9 IFDEntry ==  tag = 279 (StripByteCounts) type = LONG count = 4129 values = 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934 11934
10 IFDEntry ==  tag = 282 (XResolution) type = RATIONAL count = 1 values = 1073741824/1073741824
11 IFDEntry ==  tag = 283 (YResolution) type = RATIONAL count = 1 values = 1073741824/1073741824
12 IFDEntry ==  tag = 284 (PlanarConfiguration) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 1
13 IFDEntry ==  tag = 296 (ResolutionUnit) type = SHORT count = 1 values = 1
14 IFDEntry ==  tag = 305 (Software) type = ASCII count = 152 values = IMAGINE TIFF Support
Copyright 1991 - 1999 by ERDAS, Inc. All Rights Reserved
@(#)$RCSfile: etif.c $ $Revision: 1.9.1.2 $ $Date: 2001/12/05 00:33:12Z $


Here you can find the calibration information.

Please, post the content of your .tiff info.

orux

I think that implementation (and testing) of mor map formats would not make oruxmaps better "on the road" or more stable, and stability is THE main thing when using a gps device. I suggest to go another way. If oruxmapsdesktop could properly convert maps between the oruxmaps format and say ECW (and maybe more) the problem would be solved withoud adding complexity to oruxmaps itself. And I think somebody else than orux could work on this? As far as I know there are more "plain java" developpers out there than jave developpers with android know how. Maybe anybody can help?

anybody found a solution for jai-imageio under 64bit windows yet? i just cannot get oruxmapsdesktop to work with tif files.

joe wrote:anybody found a solution for jai-imageio under 64bit windows yet? i just cannot get oruxmapsdesktop to work with tif files.

Hi, joe;

Seems that there is no support to jai-tools in windows 64 bits.

Two options:

--install java 32 bits + jai in your 64 bits PC

--use Gimp or Photoshop to convert from tiff to png

orux

java32 on w64 clashes with other things i'm doing and png does not work for 50000x50000 pixel images. could your converter handle those sizes, just in case i fix my 32/64 problem?

now, obviously i could load those tifs into globalmapper, tile them a bit, convert the single smaller tiles to png maps, feed those to oruxmapsdesktop and then use them (a bit awkwardly) in oruxmaps. but that is a HUGE hassle to do for hundreds of maps.

i love oruxmaps. but comparing this majorly painful conversion mess to simply copying over the big tif files onto an oldfashioned twonav aventura always makes me cry. twonav reads gigantic geotifs out of the box without conversion, without trouble and with very reasonable performance, even though the wince hardware is ridicolously outdated compared to todays android smartphones.

ps, jai tools nowadays seems like a dead and abandoned project. maybe there's a chance you could find different tif reader code for oruxmapsdesktop? even if native java turns out to be a bit slower, it would imho be a better choice.

joe wrote:java32 on w64 clashes with other things i'm doing and png does not work for 50000x50000 pixel images. could your converter handle those sizes, just in case i fix my 32/64 problem?

now, obviously i could load those tifs into globalmapper, tile them a bit, convert the single smaller tiles to png maps, feed those to oruxmapsdesktop and then use them (a bit awkwardly) in oruxmaps. but that is a HUGE hassle to do for hundreds of maps.

i love oruxmaps. but comparing this majorly painful conversion mess to simply copying over the big tif files onto an oldfashioned twonav aventura always makes me cry. twonav reads gigantic geotifs out of the box without conversion, without trouble and with very reasonable performance, even though the wince hardware is ridicolously outdated compared to todays android smartphones.

Hi, joe;

The problem is that Android is very young still; it is not easy to find the libraries that support all these types of images, something for which there was no problem on WinMo.

But I'm trying to get it, although it is not easy.

orux

joe wrote:ps, jai tools nowadays seems like a dead and abandoned project. maybe there's a chance you could find different tif reader code for oruxmapsdesktop? even if native java turns out to be a bit slower, it would imho be a better choice.

I am investigating about this,

orux