National Imagery Transmission Format

National Imagery Transmission Format (NITFS, or NITF) is a family of standards developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. It's a little difficult to figure out the scope of the standards, unless you are fluent in governmentese. In practice, it seems to be mainly used as a raster graphics file format, apparently for satellite imagery and the like.

This format is not related to News Industry Text Format. It is also apparently a different thing from the National Transfer Format (NTF), though this is also used in the geospatial area.

Identification
Files begin with ASCII characters " ".

Specifications

 * Reference Library for NITFS Users: Format

Software

 * GDAL
 * Konvertor
 * XnView (uncompressed images only)

Sample files

 * http://download.osgeo.org/pub/gdal/data/nitf/

Links

 * Wikipedia article