Uniform Access to Images within Open Distributed Environments

A huge variety of (de facto) standards for image interchange, compression, and communication is employed today in different systems, applications, and environments. Within the AMICS project a framework, called Image Communication Open Architecture (ICOA) was elaborated that enables the various standards and standardization activities both in the imaging area and in the wider area of image communication to be related and the neccessary support tools to be identified. Although the framework sets a clear emphasis on the handling of images, the ICOA fulfills the image communication requirements from a wide range of application areas including multimedia. Based on the ICOA framework, software tools that support that framework were developed that focus on different requirements for image communication. Within AMICS, one image communication requirement was perceived to underlie all the others, that of providing uniform access to images whether they are stored locally or remotely. Such unifor m access is provided through the ICOA Image Handling Interface (IHI). The IHI is realized by means of the ICOA Image Handler that is modelled as an Open Distributed Processing (ODP) object. the Image Handler encompasses the support of various compression schemes and (image) data formats, as well as different conversion facilities.