Development of Data Distribution and Display Methods for Time Series Aerial Drone Images in International Image Interoperability Framework

Abstract

In recent years, aerial drones have been increasingly used for field phenotyping of crop research fields: photographs taken at low altitude are combined in an orthomosaic with positional information and stored in GeoTIFF format. Many GeoTIFF files are too large to allow easy display in image viewer software, or to distribute and browse on the Web. To overcome this limitation, we developed a method to distribute high-resolution orthomosaic images on the Web using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). By converting GeoTIFF files to map tiles in advance, this method allows the smooth delivery of images according to IIIF specifications. We show the high versatility of this method by using an existing IIIF-compatible image viewer to browse converted images. We also show its high flexibility by implementing an original image viewer using an existing IIIF-compatible library.