VITec
VITec image format, or VITec format, is a raster graphics format associated with VITec ELT (Electronic Light Table), an image processing application designed for use with geospatial data.
VITec ELT seems to have been owned by a number of different corporations and subsidiaries over the years, including GDE Systems, VITec Imaging, Tracor, and BAE Systems. It is unclear what relationship it has with VITEC, the current owner of the vitec.com domain name.
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Discussion
We have not found any specifications for the format. It supports at least truecolor and grayscale images. It appears to be uncompressed, and Image Alchemy says that it can optionally be tiled.
The Programmer's Guide document in the Links section below mentions the VITec format a number of times, and indicates that the file extension is .vitec. The description of the OpenVITecFile function on page 4–7 might give some clues about what sort of information is stored in the file.
Some sources[1] call this format VITec scanner raster format, and say it is associated with VITec scanners. Although VITEC does make devices with features that could be called "scanning", we're not convinced that the VITec format really is associated with scanners.
Identification
Some or all files begin with bytes 00 5b 07 20, most likely followed by 00 00 00 2c.
Format details
This is a partial decoding of the format, based on reverse engineering and guesswork.
Most fields are 4-byte big-endian integers. Fields not listed below are unknown, and are observed to have the value 0.
| Offset | Length | Field | Observed values | Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4 | signature | hex: 00 5b 07 20 | |
| 4 | 4 | size1 | 44 | Size of this segment of the file, in bytes from the beginning of this field |
| 4+size1 | 4 | size2 | 68 | Size of this segment of the file, in bytes from the beginning of this field |
| 4+size1+4 | 4 | image_data_size | Image data size in bytes | |
| 4+size1+24 | 4 | ? | 7 | Unknown |
| 4+size1+36 | 4 | width | Image width in pixels | |
| 4+size1+40 | 4 | height | Image height in pixels | |
| 4+size1+52 | 4 | ? | 1 for grayscale, 0 for RGB | Unknown |
| 4+size1+56 | 4 | num_samples | 1 for grayscale, 3 for RGB | Number of samples per pixel |
| 4+size1+size2 | image_data_size | image_data | A sequence of num_samples image planes. If applicable, planes are in the order red, green, blue. Each plane has height rows of width 8-bit samples. Each row is padded to the next multiple of 8 bytes. |
