Table of Contents

1 The IBIS System and VICAR

The Image-Based Information System (IBIS) was developed in 1975 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is designed to be a comprehensive geographic information system that performs operations on raster image, tabular, and graphics format data, using the Video Image Communication And Retrieval (VICAR) image processing system. This was accomplished by the creation of a new VICAR-based file format for tabulating raster format geographic information over multiple data planes.

The IBIS tabular file format, together with its associated IBISFIL subroutine library and programs, forms the heart of the IBIS system and has proved to be very useful tool for many diverse applications, such as multispectral classification, image rubbersheeting and mosaicing, stereo matching, image indexing and other geographic/cartographic applications.

With the advent of the VICAR Unix-Port project it has now become timely to reconsider the IBIS system, its file formats, and the issues arising in the effort to port the system to Unix.