IMG2PNG, PDS/FITS to PNG conversion Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I decided to create a special thread for this topic. Previously information on IMG2PNG was scattered across various threads here.

I new version of IMG2PNG is now available. For those that don't know, this is a command line uitility that can convert various PDS formatted files to PNGs (8 or 16 bits per pixel depending on the input files).

This utility should work for lots of different PDS files, e.g. MER, Pathfinder, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, Stardust, various Mars orbiters, Mariner 9/10 (!), Viking Orbiter, Viking Lander, Magellan, Clementine, Messenger, New Horizons etc.

The major new feature in the new version is the ability to convert FITS files.

IMG2PNG can be downloaded by visiting http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/utils/img2png

Any information on possible bugs welcome.

[Sajid]

To put things into context, I am working on a real-time renderer for large data sets. The hypothesis is that a point-based rendering algorithm can render extremely large data-sets directly from range-images or DTMs without polygonization, at native resolution, take less memory, and still be faster.

So far, its working for range-images, and we managed to get a poster at SIGGRAPH last year. Now I would like to test the renderer with the Mars DTMs. 32-bit precision is important because some of the recent HiRise DTMs are natively 32-bit. Any conversion to 16-bit will invalidate my claim that we are preserving 'native' data. In addition, although the original data may have been derived from a 12 bit A/D converter, the derivation of a DTM requires calculations that will generally be done in 32-bits, even if later truncated/rounded to 16-bits.