Slashdot Mirror
Massive Mosaic of Canada
rvr writes "Thanks to compression technology that has reduced the file to 3.3 gigabytes and a collaboration between the Canadian Forest Service and the Canadian Space Agency called the 'Earth Observation for Sustainable Development of Forests', this gigantic image -- the highest-resolution image of Canada freely available -- can now be downloaded to your computer."
since i just did a large project project on image compression techniques, i'm really curious to know what they did to get the 28:1 odd compression ratios. based on my (admittedly limited) playing around with jpeg 2000, this seems like it would be an ideal application (in fact, i'm fairly certain they could squeeze even more data into that space at equivalent quality). in my experiments, jpeg 2000 beat the snot out of everything else (using the lovely jasper toolkit)... i don't know of too many other formats which can achieve 100:1 compression ratios in natural images and still have the results be recognizable. either way, very cool for an image processing geek like myself.