FEATURE EXTRACTION BY INTERACTIVE IMAGE PROCESSING.

A major problem encountered by automatic detection systems is the delineation of boundaries around areas containing features of interest. The computer is often unable to accomplish the detection process alone. Therefore, it is reasonable to combine the superior pattern recognition abilities of a human being with the computational power of a digital computer to form an interactive system. Such an interactive feature extraction system is discussed. The objective is to generate the photo coordinates for feature boundaries from aerial photographs. The hardware consists of a CDC-6400 sequential computer, a Goodyear STARAN associative array processor, a DEC PDP 11/50 minicomputer, and an image display, as well as digitizing and recording devices.