Imaging systems and picture collection management: a review

Abstract

Vannevar Bush had visions of the potential of images but the earliest working systems were probably those developed at the Stanford Research Institute and at Xerox. Douglas Engelbart's NLS system which was working at SRI in the 1960s included means for organizing graphical information; Engelbart is credited with the invention of the mouse. A number of people from NLS joined Xerox following the establishment of its Palo Alto Research Centre (P ARC) in 1970. Alan Kay and others in the new team were the first to use the term computers (to describe the ALTO machine which appeared in 1972). Having also invented the laser printer, the PARC team moved on to the STAR machine using a Mouse-Ikon-WYSIWYG interface with integrated text and graphics viewed on a high resolution screen. The STAR included the bitblt function-a method of manipulating a pixel array with a single instruction-often thought to have been first introduced in the Graphic Signal Processors (GSPs) of the late 1980s. The STAR first appeared publicly in 1980. Johnson et al. [32] suggest that the STAR was descended from Bush's Memex via NLS and Alto, and itself was the ancestor-by-influence of Lisa, Macintosh, Interleaf, Postscript, etc. Interest was aroused by these events, by the decrease in cost of such essentials as processing power, storage, and good quality colour, and by the arrival of relatively inexpensive peripheral devices such as scanners, monitors, printers, etc. The sales of microcomputer hardware and software need to be sustained by waves of hype. Images are receiving this treatment following the tradition set by colour, word processing, desktop publishing, windows etc. Simplistic ideas reminiscent of the home recipe file (once suggested as a reason why a personal computer would soon be found in every home) accompanied the arrival of imaging. But there are now good reasons for believing that image storage and retrieval will soon unlock new information resources con·