The National Imagery Transmission Format Standard (NITFS) is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Federal Intelligence Community (IC) suite of standards for the exchange, storage, and transmission of digital-imagery products and image-related products.
SDEs may be incorporated into an NITF file while maintaining backward compatibility because the identifier and byte count mechanisms allow applications developed prior to the addition of newly defined data to skip over extension fields they are not designed to interpret.
Its content evolved over the years to embrace new technology in support of emerging operational requirements.
Commercial implementations of the standard are largely driven by marketability to the DoD and IC.
The JBP is a profile of ISO/IEC 12087-5, Basic Image Interchange Format, in lieu of the previous military standards.