A New Automatic Processing Technique for Satellite Imagery Analysis

Book excerpt: A new approach to the analysis of satellite imagery is presented. The central part of this approach is an algorithm which compresses information stored in the ordinary six or eight bits per picture element into only one bit. The quality of this compression is demonstrated by examples of its application to high resolution visual imagery. Both visual inspection and rms difference criterion are used for this evaluation. There are four objectives of this report which are: to review the status of processing techniques which remove redundant information, to show the need for redundance reduction in the processing of satellite images, to present the development of an algorithm for reducing it, and to show results obtained by application of the algorithm to visual imagery. Also, comments are made on needed developments of the technique and its potential application to problems of analysis of satellite imagery data. (Author).