One of the most exciting features in the latest version of LuciadFusion, Hexagon’s all-in-one server solution for geospatial data management, is added support for the ECWP (ECW Protocol) and HSPC (Hexagon Smart Point Cloud) service types.
For big data sets, imagery, and point clouds, fast streaming to remote clients is challenging. Typically, this type of data has a tiled and multi-leveled structure. That solves the need for speed, but the disk space needed to store the data is also a concern for many organizations.
ECWP and HSPC address that concern by offering direct streaming of data in the ECW and HSPC formats. These formats bring exceptional data compression while preserving accuracy. The smaller file or tile sizes also result in even faster client-side visualization.
Using the intuitive data manager of LuciadFusion, LuciadFusion Studio, users can discover data sets in ECW or HSPC, manage the data, and serve it to clients as ECWP or HSPC service. These formats and service types are supported across Hexagon’s product lines for maximum interoperability.
Benefits and advantages
Hexagon scanners, such as the Leica BLK2GO, allow exporting point clouds in HSPC, a 3D-tiled format. This way, Hexagon customers can avoid additional conversion steps into LAS, E57, or OGC 3D Tiles. Advantages of HSPC compared to OGC 3D Tiles are compression of the tile payload and precise encoding of the point locations.
The ECW imagery format, meanwhile, provides exceptional compression while retaining an image’s full visual quality. The ERDAS ECW wavelet compression algorithm achieves 15:1 compression ratios at a visually lossless quality level. It’s capable of reducing terabyte-sized files to 5% of their original size, and the result is a much smaller single file that can be stored, sent, and displayed even on small devices. It’s also at least 50% faster than other compression techniques.
Serving ECW files with the OGC WMS or WMTS service type is possible, but this interoperability comes at the expense of the exceptional compression and low storage requirements of ECW. Using ECWP, the original ECW compression is preserved and exploited in the web service.
Adding support for HSPC and ECWP to LuciadFusion is just one more way that Hexagon’s Geospatial division has chosen to leverage today’s newest, smartest technologies so that users can achieve their objectives quickly and with ease. Learn more about the features in the latest release of LuciadFusion.
