Case Study: GeoSpace International achieves a single, streamable 50‑cm national basemap and 97% storage reduction with Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division (GeoCompressor)

Compress Terabyte-Sized Imagery into a Single Source of Truth

GeoSpace International, a leading aerial photography and GIS/GPS/remote sensing provider in Southern Africa, faced a massive data-management problem: covering South Africa at 50 cm GSD produced about 45,800 orthorectified images (≈46,000 TIFFs) totaling ~30 TB, making search, storage, display and distribution to government users impractical. To address this, GeoSpace engaged Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division and used Hexagon’s GeoCompressor (with ERDAS APOLLO for distribution).

Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division used GeoCompressor to assemble and visually‑losslessly compress all source imagery into a single ECW mosaic in 10 days, reducing storage to ~866 GB (about a 10:1 compression and ~97% smaller than uncompressed TIFFs, 71% smaller than JPEG Q5). The ECW file is streamed via ERDAS APOLLO to thousands of users daily, can be updated by region without rebuilding the whole mosaic, and now serves as a single, interoperable basemap for multiple government agencies—delivering substantial time, cost and storage savings.

GeoSpace International

Bernhard Jacobs

Director