Heavyweights push digital photography for consumers. (FlashPix architecture)(Latest Word) (Technology Information)

Kodak FlashPix standard endorsed by Microsoft, HP, Live Picture

A coalition of vendors, led by Kodak, Live Picture, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, announced a new imaging architecture last week at Comdex. Called FlashPix, the architecture is designed to bring photographic-quality image editing to a broader consumer market.

Derived from IVUE. The image file format underlying FlashPix borrows heavily from IVUE, the format developed by Live Picture. As we reported a year ago in our feature article on the product, IVUE is notable for the way it handles large images. Transformations are stored in mathematical form as scripts called "viewing parameters," which can be applied to the high-resolution file when needed, rather than executed while the user works with a low-resolution file on the screen.

The IVUE format is not only compact, but also faster to process. Images are stored as a quilt of tiles, rather than as one large file. When you retouch in Live Picture, it loads the high-res file for a tile, rather than the whole picture, which greatly reduces the amount of RAM required to process images.

A FlashPix file contains the complete image plus a hierarchy of several lower-resolution copies of the same file. Both high- and low-res versions are tiled. Applications can access either rendition. The coalition …