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Image reconnaissance is a range of actions aiming at gaining and recording information about a terrain in the form of images with precisely specified coordinates. Their quality and durability enable processing, interpretation, distribution and collecting. Images are acquired in different ranges of electromagnetic spectrum by sensors situated on platforms moving in space at different altitudes. Their most essential feature is being very up-to-date. In the last few years access to imagery data and especially high resolution images acquired from satellite altitudes rose significantly. That is why, the need to measure their quality and usefulness is essential to developing and functioning of imagery systems. Resolution, as a means of image quality evaluation, is commonly accepted despite the fact that it has significant drawbacks. The most important is that it is not directly related to the possibility of image interpretation and can give obscure results. What is more, measurement of resolution requires introducing specially developed calibration targets to every evaluated image. In order to eliminate the disadvantages of using resolution as a measure, in the 1970s in USA the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS) was created. It is used by analysts to attribute an image a number that indicates the possibility of conducting its interpretation. The interpretational capacity is defined as a measure of usefulness of the image for analysis or exploitation. The NIIRS provides a scale that can be used with different imaging systems and which is a unique tool for objective measurement of a subjective value characterizing the image interpretational capacity. The main purpose of this paper is to present an evaluation of the interpretational quality of images based on high resolution satellite data using NIIRS.
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