The OME-TIFF File

OME partners at LOCI have developed a variant of the OME-XML File specifically designed for data acquisition and storage. This format, called OME-TIFF, uses OME-XML in the standard TIFF header and stores binary image data in a multi-page TIFF file.

LOCI maintains the OME-TIFF documentation and specification available at http://www.ome-xml.org/wiki/OmeTiff.

In the OME-XML File binary image data is stored as compressed base64. This is convenient for data migration, but has some drawbacks:

• Decoding base64-encoded image planes is computationally expensive.
• There is no facility to split a dataset among multiple files on disk.

OME-TIFF is designed to solve these problems. OME-TIFF means that:

• Image planes are stored within one multi-page TIFF file, or across multiple TIFF files. Any image organization is feasible.
• A complete OME-XML metadata block describing the image is embedded in each TIFF file's header. Thus, even if some of the TIFF files in a 5-dimensional image are misplaced, the metadata remains intact.
• The OME-XML metadata block in an OME-TIFF file may contain anything a standard OME-XML file can, including multiple OME images with multiple sets of pixels.
• The only conceptual difference between OME-XML and OME-TIFF is that instead of encoding pixels as base64 chunks within the XML like OME-XML does, OME-TIFF uses the standard TIFF mechanism for storing one or more image planes in each of the constituent file(s).
• Storing image data in TIFF is a de facto standard, and essentially all image handling software can read TIFF-based formats, thus adoption and integration of OME-TIFF is straightforward.