This specification is intended to provide guidelines for the preparation and use of CIB data to support various military weapons, C3I theater battle management, mission planning, and digital moving map systems. CIB data is not a commercial product and is releasable only to DoD and its' associated contractors.

a. CIB image data is of appropriate size and quality for use in military command and control systems, ground-based force to unit-level mission planning systems, and aircraft cockpit displays. CIB is intended to satisfy the needs of a broad range of military users in its compression ratio and file format.

b. The 8:1 reduction in the size of CIB files compared to source imagery and the reformatting of the data into RPF offers distinct operational, logistical, and supportability benefits to the many military users of digital imagery data. It permits the same data sets to be used for both ground-based and aircraft cockpit displays, offers significant savings in media storage/transportation and peripherals (i.e., hard disk) costs, results in faster data loading times and requires less frequent reloading of hard disks from media. The compression of CIB data results in no perceptible loss of image quality.

c. CIB (frame file)s are physically formatted within a NITF message.