Meta Raster Format

Meta Raster Format is an image and data storage format designed for fast access to imagery within a georeferenced tile pyramid at discrete resolutions. It was originally developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It is a composite format, with an image consisting of 3 components:


 * 1) MRF metadata file in XML format (file extension: .mrf)
 * 2) MRF data file. This is either a "Pile of PNGs" (file extension: .ppg) or a "Pile of JPEGS" (file extension: pjg). The data file contains blocks of concatenated images in PNG or JPEG format.
 * 3) MRF index file (file extension: .idx)

In addition, recent versions of the format are reported to support Limited Error Raster Compression (LERC), which was developed at ESRI. However, the current (January 2015) version of the filespec does not mention LERC yet.

Specification

 * Meta Raster Format Specification v0.3.0 (Draft)

Software

 * Meta Raster Format driver for GDAL

Links

 * Meta Raster Format User Guide
 * NASA, Esri speed delivery of cloud-based imagery data