Library support for very high dynamic range TIFF files?

Question

I work with satellite radar, and have been provided with a (very) large TIFF file containing 32 bpp greyscale data. Unfortunately, libtiff, the standard Linux library for working with TIFF files, doesn't support SampleFormat TIFF files, which means no support for high bit depth greyscale images or floating-point images.

Does anyone know of a FOSS C library which provides support for these types of images? Failing that, can anyone suggest of an appropriate file format to convert to, and a FOSS library that can load that? (Ideally, it should be generally accepted by the scientific community for data interchange, and supported by IDL/ENVI).

Answer 1

Well libtiff should be able to handle the format, although you may be limited to the low-level apis and doing the conversion to an image yourself. If the size of the images are >4Gb, there is bigtiff, a port of libtiff which handles extremely large images.