An Expert System for Remote Sensing

The Canada Centre for Remote Sensing has developed two hierarchical expert systems, the Analyst Advisor and the Map Image Congruency Evaluation (MICE) advisor. These expert systems are built upon our Remote-Sensing Shell (RESHELL) written in Logicware´s MPROLOG. A shell is a programming environment that specifically caters to expert system development. Knowledge is represented in the production rules and frames database. Numerical processing takes place using the extensive FORTRAN code of the Landsat Digital Image Analysis System (LDIAS). The LDIAS includes several DEC VAX computers, image displays, specialized processors, and DEC Al VAXstations. The paper describes the architecture of the expert system to compare maps and images (MICE) and the expert system to advise on the extraction of resource information from remotely sensed data, the Analyst Advisor. Details are given concerning the structure of RESHELL and our methods of interfacing symbolic reasoning in PROLOG on the Al VAX stations with numeric processing in FORTRAN on several different computers. The first prototype of the Analyst Advisor will be released for internal use at CCRS in March 1987.