New technique ramps up image delivery over the Web

With a little help from a pair of astronomers, the aggravation of waiting — and waiting and waiting — for high-resolution images to download to a computer could become a thing of the past.

A newly patented software code developed by Jeffrey Percival, a University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer, and Richard White, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, promises to speed up the delivery of images over the Internet by orders of magnitude.

The potential, according to Percival, is to have remotely delivered, high-density images appear on computer screens 10 to 100 times faster. “The niche that this technology fits,” says Percival, “is if your images are large compared to your bandwidth.”
The technology, he says, could be especially useful for the growing number of Internet users, such as scientists, publishers, engineers, libraries and government agencies, who require high-density image delivery.

The software delivers pictures so that only the most important information is sent first, allowing the computer to rapidly build a quality picture. The image improves over time as the vastly larger amount of less important elements of the picture are transmitted.

The software, says Percival, was born of the need of astronomers to send by telephone line the high-density, excruciatingly detailed images taken by modern telescopes. Increasingly, astronomers depend on observatories to send over the Internet the images of stars, planets and galaxies captured by telescopes in remote locations in the world.

The patent for the technology was recently secured by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation that manages technology on behalf of UW–Madison faculty and staff.