Digital image processing, originally established to analyze and improve lunar images, is rapidly growing into a wealth of new appli- cations, due to the enormous technical progress made in computer engineering. At present, the most important fields of growth appear to emerge in the areas of medical image processing (i. e. tomography, thermography), earth resource inventory (i. e. land usage, minerals), office automation (i. e. document storage, retrieval and reproduction) and industrial production (i. e. computer vision for mechanical ro- bots). Currently, emphasis is being shifted from...