CIB (Controlled Image Base) Reader/Writer

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Professional Edition.

The CIB Reader and Writer allow FME to read and write data in the CIB (Controlled Image Base) format.

Overview

CIB is a dataset of orthophotos, made from rectified grayscale aerial images. CIB supports various weapons, C3I theater battle management, mission planning, digital moving map, terrain analysis, simulation, and intelligence systems.

CIB files are usually physically formatted within a National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) message. The CIB reader can read CIB files with or without the NITF message wrapper. The CIB writer can create CIB datasets with or without the NITF message wrapper. These options available in the Writer Feature Type Parameters.

The CIB Reader and Writer implement the following standards:

  • MIL-C-89041
  • MIL-STD-2411
  • MIL-STD-2411-1
  • MIL-STD-2411-2

CIB image data is of appropriate size and quality for use in military command and control systems, ground-based force to unit-level mission planning systems, and aircraft cockpit displays. CIB is intended to satisfy the needs of a broad range of military users in its compression ratio and file format.

Reader Overview

FME considers a single CIB TOC file to be a dataset.

The CIB TOC file contains the location and name of the frame files. The frame files are raster files containing pixel data.

Writer Overview

FME considers a CIB destination dataset to be a container folder name. Each feature type has a subfolder inside the container folder. Inside each subfolder, there is a table of contents file A.TOC and one or more subfolders containing some frame files. The frame files and their subfolders are named according to the specification MIL-STD-2411.

All raster features of the same CIB feature type are grouped under one table of contents file. Each raster feature represents one boundary rectangle basically, but when the extents of the raster feature overlap two or more zones, the raster feature will be broken down into multiple boundary rectangles, each of which covers the raster subset in one zone. According to the specification, adjacent zones overlap each other, and the raster data in the intersection area will be repeated in the two boundary rectangles. Since each zone has a specific vertical/horizontal intervals and resolutions, the boundary rectangles may need to be resampled.

Each boundary rectangle will be broken down into one or more frame files. Each frame file has a size of 1536 x 1536. When the number of rows or columns in a frame is less than 4, the writer will not create the frame file, since the writer requires at least 4 rows and columns to do the spatial compression. The generated palette will have 216 or 217 entries depending on whether a NoData value is present. Each palette entry is a 1-byte grayscale value.

Among all the format attributes, the cib_frame_data_series_code is the most important. The data series code determines the resolution of the destination dataset. According to MIL-STD-2411-1, there are 5 fixed resolutions, and 1 variable resolution. The resolution affects the spacing of the frame files in each zone. When the source raster does not have the correct spacing, the CIB writer must resample the raster to match the spacing of the frame.

Please see Feature Representation for the list of possible format attribute values.

FME Raster Features

FME raster features represent raster data and use several concepts that are unlike those used in the handling of vector data. The topics below describe how FME processes raster data.

About FME Rasters Tiling and Mosaicking
Raster Properties Band Combining and Separating
Band Properties Band and Palette Selection
Palette Properties Raster Processing
Compression Raster versus Vector Features
Pyramiding Raster File Naming
Interleaving World Files
Interpretation and Data Type TAB Files
Palette Resolution  

The CIB reader produces rasters with a single UInt8 band that has a Gray8 palette.

The CIB writer accepts only rasters with a single Gray8 band.