Birp---A Way to Search Through Image Engineering Data

Several hundred thousand images have been returned by planetary missions and by Earth orbiting satellites. Locating specific images for study based on engineering data (e.g., frame center latitude, longitude, etc.) can be cumbersome and time consuming if done manually. BIRP, a FORTRAN program for small computers, is designed to quickly search through catalogs of image engineering data. A description of the desired images is entered and the BIRP program finds the images meeting the requirements. A videodisk player or microfiche reader may be controlled by BIRP so that images can be viewed immediately after a search. A search through 50 000 images on a single parameter (e.g., date of exposure) takes less than 1 min on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-11/34 minicomputer. Data for each parameter is stored in a separate file so that the number of files and thus the storage space required may be varied to fit computers with different storage capacities. Most modern minicomputers with FORTRAN compilers and an 8-bit byte variable type may use BIRP with minor modifications to the program.