ECW (file format)

Enhanced Compressed Wavelet, Enhanced Compression Wavelet also briefly ECW, is a file format for lossy storage of very large raster graphics. It is mainly used in the field of GIS.

ECW JPEG 2000 format is the similar and was developed by the company Earth Resource Mapping and Leica Geosystems. It has the advantage that applications do not have to maintain the entire raster graphics in memory for display, but only the area that is currently displayed. This allows very large volumes of images, such as those arise in astronomical images, satellite images of the position or the orthophotography, is highly compressed with good image quality and used on conventional PCs.

Files in the ECW format usually have the file extension ". ECW ".

Applications

ECW is supported by leading GIS solutions in professional and semi-professional, including ArcGIS / ArcView, Global Mapper, Intergraph GeoMedia, Falco View, MapWindow GIS, gvSIG, QV, OziExplorer,

For the ECW as a graphics format, there are plug-ins for example, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, AutoCAD, IrfanView, ACDSee and others, including streamlined viewer like XnView process size. For use in networks or the Internet based on the ECW streaming protocol ECWP was created.