The development of ECW was interesting. It became obvious that we had to solve the problem of enabling imagery access from within any application, and serving of imagery into those applications using the Internet. Clearly imagery needed to be seamlessly accessible within image processing products, GIS, CAD, Office applications, web browsers and custom applications. The problem is the sheer size of images. In 1998, I was doing some research on wavelet mathematics, which has application for DEM and feature extraction using image correlation.
Wavelets also offer advantages for image compression.
We recently received a United States Patent for the ECW technology. As your readers may know, LizardTech claimed that ECW infringed their MrSID technology. The US Federal Court recently ruled that ECW does not in any way infringe on the patent licensed by LizardTech for the MrSID product. We are very pleased to see this matter put to rest. As result, we see a very bright future for the ECW standard.