USDA ARS

IPW Images

IPW images contain spatial data for a geographic region. The term "image" is an artifact of IPW's origins in processing images from remote sensing. However, an IPW image is not limited to remote sensing data; an image may contain any spatial data distributed in regular intervals over a region. An example is a digital elevation map (DEM).

Elements of an IPW Image

File format

Each IPW image is a single UNIX file with two sections:

  1. the headers stored as text, followed by
  2. the pixel data stored as binary values.


IPW documentation / Last revised 20 May 2009 / IPW web site