Auswatch was the companion CD-ROM to the printed book "Looking Back - The changing face of the Australian Continent, 1972-1992". These two publications were produced in 1992 for the Australian Case Study for International Space Year (1992).
Auswatch was an attempt to make satellite imagery available in a form that could be viewed, explored and enhanced on a personal computer with a CD drive. The software, Auswatch 1.0, was originally written for the Macintosh and was subsequently adapted to run under Windows 3.1 on a PC. Each version has a window based interface and included online documentation.
The software allows the viewing of multichannel images and provides other basic image processing functions such as querying pixel values, the generation and use of histograms, creation of profiles and scatterplots. Various enhancement techniques are provided which use lookup-tables to define the colours to be used for display.
Auswatch works best with display systems that can display at least 256 colours. However, even systems displaying less than 256 colours or only greyscale can be used to a certain extent. On the Macintosh, the software will take advantage of any video system up to full colour 24 bit displays, including multiple monitors. On PCs running Windows 3.1, the software works best with VGA or SVGA cards capable of displaying 256 colours at 640 by 480 pixel resolution or better, but will operate in a slightly limited way with VGA cards displaying only 16 colours.
There are many valuable data sets on the CD-ROM that will be of interest to users already having image processing capabilities on more powerful computers. The satellite images were written in the DISIMP format, which may be read by a number of popular image processing systems used in Australia.
Auswatch is still available from the publisher and will operate on most Macintosh computers and PCs running Windows3.1. It remains a useful introduction to the techniques used in processing remotely sensed data.