The Internet Imaging Protocol, or IIP, is an

Internet protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. ...

International Imaging Industry Association The International Imaging Industry Association (I3A) was created by a merger of the Photographic and Imaging Manufacturers Association (PIMA) and the Digital Imaging Group in 2001. It was a common forum for the industrial imaging industry. It us ...

. IIP is built on top of

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

to communicate images and their metadata and took inspiration from the

FlashPix FlashPix is a bitmapped computer graphics file format where the image is saved in more than one resolution. Its design anticipated that when an HTTP request is sent for the file by a browser plugin implementing the format, only the image compati ...

image architecture. It emerged to tackle the problem that image sizes and resolution was growing faster than internet bandwidth - so it was difficult to quickly browse high quality images in web browsers. IIP allows the detail to be fetched when the user needs it, so the whole data file is not downloaded before. Practically it defines how software fetches image tiles from a server. This includes the scale of the image - so a small overview image can be retrieved initially. Zooming and panning are carried out by fetching higher resolution image tiles from server. This means any size of image can be viewed on the Web without downloading it all. IIP also makes it possible to use a variety of viewer software whereas other systems may force the use of one server, file format and one viewer. IIP is currently in version 1.05 and is not actively developing further.

External links

Internet Imaging Protocol specification, Version 1.05Martinez, K., Cupitt, J. and Perry, S. (1998) High resolution Colorimetric Image Browsing on the Web At WWW7 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web. , pp. 399-405IIPImage: IIP based open source visualization software
{{internet-stub Internet protocols