STANSORT - Stanford Remote Sensing Laboratory pattern recognition and classification system

The principal barrier to routine use of the ERTS multispectral scanner computer compatible tapes, rather than photointerpretation examination of the images, has been the high computing costs involved due to the large quantity of information (4 Mbytes) contained in a scene. STANSORT, the interactive program package developed at Stanford Remote Sensing Laboratories alleviates this problem, providing an extremely rapid, flexible and low cost tool for data reduction, scene classification, species searches and edge detection. The primary classification procedure, utilizing a search with variable gate widths, for similarities in the normalized, digitized spectra is described along with associated procedures for data refinement and extraction of information. The more rigorous statistical classification procedures are also explained.