Re: compression tricks for storing terabytes of images?

Posted by Kurt Thorn on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/compression-tricks-for-storing-terabytes-of-images-tp7584921p7584927.html

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On 3/21/2016 3:37 AM, Emmanuel Levy wrote:

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> Dear All,
>
> I'm wondering if some of you may have suggestions regarding archiving large
> image datasets?
>
> So far I've come up to the conclusion that bzip2 is the most convenient
> compression solution to use because it's lossless and it works on any type
> of data (e.g., tif, stacks) and maintains the metadata.
>
> If anyone knows of good and easy to implement alternatives I'll be very
> happy to hear about it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> All the best,
>
> Emmanuel
>
I recently learned about FLIF (http://flif.info/) which is a very nice
compression scheme for 2D image data.  Unfortunately, it doesn't support
stacks and metadata but it seems to perform better than most other
compression schemes on a wide range of images.  It could be the core of
a nice compression solution for scientific images.  Unfortunately, it
doesn't seem like any compression scheme is going to deliver better than
about a 2-fold space savings.

Kurt

--
Kurt Thorn
Associate Professor
Director, Nikon Imaging Center
http://thornlab.ucsf.edu/
http://nic.ucsf.edu/blog/