IMAGE-ANALYSIS WORKSTATIONS

The advent of synthetic-aperture radar images (SAR) following the launch of ERS-1, provides an opportunity to develop systems that use remote sensing images for a wide variety of operational applications. The large volume of SAR data that will be collected necessitates an automated approach to analysis of the images. SAR data have characteristics that complicate the image analysis tasks which are required to meet the needs of most end-user applications. The development of tools that can support the user or provide a fully automated processing capability, is the key to the wide exploitation of SAR data. This review paper describes systems being developed to meet this need. These systems are SIFES (SAR image feature extraction system), initially being developed to detect ships, MuSIP (multi-sensor image processing) for knowledge-based fusion and interpretation of multi-temporal or multi-sensor images, and a picture understanding database, which provides advanced facilities for handling spatial data.