LOW BITRATE MONOCHROME STILL IMAGE COMPRESSION Contact Kennith Whitson, Central Imagery Office, 8401 Old Courthouse Road, Vienna VA 22182-3280, (703) 285-5649. The Central Imagery Office (CIO) seeks candidates for a new low bitrate monochrome still image compression algorithm for inclusion in the National Imagery Transmission Format Standard (NITFS). New algorithms are sought for compression of 8 to 12 bit imagery to rates below 0.5 bits per pixel (bpp), with quality loss at 0.5 bpp of no more than 0.5 on the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS). This is roughly the performance of JPEG DCT compression with quantization tables optimized to images. The CIO has an advanced algorithm to meet this need, but new algorithms with better performance are sought. Interested parties must respond to the POC identified above by 022895, expressing their interest and giving a brief description of their algorithm. Non-government evaluation assistance will be provided to the CIO, therefore, proprietary information should not be disclosed. Offerors must be willing to relinquish or sell to the government at a reasonable price all proprietary elements of the algorithm for inclusion in the NITFS. Respondents whose proposed algorithms appear to be consistent with the stated requirements will receive an evaluation packet consisting of on the order of six original images and sample reconstructed images for self-evaluation. Offerors whose algorithms cannot perform better than the example reconstructions should not continue with the evaluation. The evaluation packet will also contain a detailed questionnaire for offerors about their algorithms, and detailed instructions for further stages of evaluation. The algorithms will be assessed on reconstructed image quality, cost to the government of acquiring rights to the algorithm, portability to a wide variety of platforms, computational complexity, bitrate control, and vulnerability to bit errors. The government reserves the right to accept any number of algorithms for inclusion in the NITFS, or not to accept any proposed algorithm. The CIO will not pay any costs associated with responding to this announcement. No contract award is anticipated as a consequence of this announcement.

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