AFRL Develops Open-Source National Imagery Transmission Format Library Published Dec. 13, 2006 By Plans and Programs Directorate AFRL/XP WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- AFRL and Stellar Science, a computer software development company, developed and published an open-source C++ library capable of reading National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) 2.0 and 2.1 image files. NITF is the formatting standard for digital imagery and imagery-related products. The Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community, and other US government agencies use NITF to exchange images between organizations. NITF is also the standard for image sharing among North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries, with NITF 2.1 known as the NATO Secondary Image Format. NITF is highly flexible and very complex, supporting various bit rates, compression schemes, blocking schemes, subimages, and graphical overlays. The NITF specification includes an extensible framework for representing file- and image-level electronic support data. This support data varies depending on the source and type of imagery present in the file and contains information that can aid the exploitation process. There are many support data extensions officially registered for various imagery types, and many unregistered extensions exist as well. This new open-source library conforms to the basic NITF 2.0 and 2.1 specifications and includes a framework for defining and parsing tagged record extensions. The framework allows C++ application developers to easily define extensions by writing a succinct code that resembles the tabular specification within a NITF controlled extensions document. A number of proprietary NITF readers are available; until now, however, there has been no freely available, robust software library capable of processing NITF files. The AFRL-developed library is freely available based on both the potential improvements to DoD interagency image exchange processes and the costs saved by eliminating repeated NITF implementations.