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Abstract
The widespread application of Geographical Information System (GIS) packages worldwide needs standardization of remote sensing satellite digital image data products' formats and its contents. Geographic Tagged Image File Format (GeoTIFF) format is an effort towards this. The Aldus-Adobe's public domain Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is one of the widely used raster file formats, which is platform independent and has provision for extension. The basic idea was to exploit the extensibility feature of TIFF, which allows to officially register new TIFF Tags in order to create a well established structured format/space for a variety of geographic information. GeoTIFF format fully complies with the TIFF 6.0 specifications, and its extensions do not in any way go against the TIFF recommendations, nor do they limit the scope of raster data supported by TIFF. It uses a "MetaTag" (GeoKey) approach to encode dozens of information elements into just six tags, taking advantage of TIFF platform-independent data format representation to avoid cross-platform interchange difficulties. These keys are designed in a manner parallel to standard TIFF tags, and closely follow the TIFF discipline in their structure and layout. New keys may be defined as needs arise, within the current framework, and without requiring the allocation of new tags from Aldus/Adobe. The GeoTIFF specification defines a set of TIFF tags provided to describe all "Cartographic" information associated with TIFF imagery that originates from satellite imaging systems, scanned aerial photography, scanned maps, digital elevation models, or as a result of geographic analysis. Its aim is to allow means for tying a raster image to a known model space or map projection. This paper gives features of GeoTIFF and how it is useful for various GIS and image processing packages to directly use GeoTIFF images with portability. Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) Data Products in GeoTIFF is also briefly described.