Finding the earth in ERTS

Itek's Optical System Division recently completed an investigation funded by NASA to develop interpretation methods and algorithms suitable for recognition of earth resources by machines using multispectral data from ERTS. Through the algorithms developed (and described here) it is now possible to automatically recognize terrain types. The clustering algorithm guarantees high accuracy in the recognition process with almost complete automation. Interestingly, the machine recognition seems to be more accurate than a human photointerpreter who has been restricted to using only ERTS-1 color composites. That is, machine recognition appears to be more sensitive, it can operate much closer, to the resolution limit of the ERTS-1 imagery than the human photointerpreter.