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1. INTRODUCTION 
Digital processing of multispectral scanner images namely ERTS-MSS 
scenes has supplemented all other image processing activity at the 
German Aerospace Research Center. To process these pictures a new 
and fast system has been installed, which will be used mostly in 
an interactive mode, i.e. the user observes the processing on a 
screen and decides which steps to be taken to reach his specific 
classification goal. Going back and forth between pictorial and 
statistical information on different parts of the image enables 
him to find his way in a pictorial environment consisting of more 
spectral bands than his eyes can perceive. 
2. THE IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEM "DIBIAS" 
Installation of the image processing system DIBIAS (DIgitales 
BIldAnalyse System) started in March 1974. With a delay of a few 
months, mainly due to late delivery of subsystems and to a syn 
chronization problem when transferring pictures from digital tape 
to a drum type scanner, the first ERTS frames have been written on 
black and white photographic paper in August 1974. The results pre 
sented in this paper are therefore not as advanced as we had intended 
them to be. 
Our system is centered around a fast semiconductor memory minicompu 
ter with 48 kbyte of memory at the present stage (Fig. 1). Two 800 
bpi, 45 ips tape transports allow playback of ERTS Computer Compa 
tible Tapes and storage of our program sources. A system's teletype 
and a TTY compatible CRT allow (almost) independent program develop 
ment and image processing at the same time. The serial matrix printer 
is also used to produce numerical printouts of the images. We envi 
saged converting it to a fully graphic machine but restrained our 
selves because of the heavy mechanical troubles. (It would have pro 
duced black and white pictures some 700 picture elements wide - 
just the size to print ERTS classification results.) The image out 
put is on a drum type facsimile machine, which produces pictures of 
DIBIAS DFVLR OBERPFAFFENHOFEN