Learning about the image format

The tiles are apparently stored in the lightning strike wavelet-compressed raster image format. Apparently, there exists no free software to work with such files. Here’s what we found:

• archived web page from the company that developed the format
• there is a patent describing the approach
• archived homepage of one of the developers and her publication list; relevant paper: Hongyang Chao & Paul Fisher, An Approach of integer reversible wavelet transform for Lossless image compression, in Advances in Computational Mathematics: Guangzhou, China – the proceedings of Guangzhou International Symposium on Computational Mathematics, Aug. 11-15, 1997, Guangzhou, P.R.China
• There existed a browser plugin to decode such images.
  • There also existed a Java browser applet whose classes were available (after filling out a form), both directly usable (e.g., Lightning.class, not archived) and as archive on a download page (classes.tgz, not archived).

• There seem to be different (incompatible) versions:

  I have tried to use some .cod images from my website inside the Java applet, and they do not display correctly. What could be wrong?

  Most likely, they were compressed with an earlier version of Lightning Strike. The Java applet was designed for use with Lightning Strike 2.6 images, and for the sake of size and download time, was not made backward compatible. Try opening the images in the Lightning Strike 2.6 compressor and then resaving them in the new format.