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A dendrone is a hierarchical thresholding structure that can be automatically generated from a complex image. The dendrone structure captures the connectedness of objects and subobjects during successive brightness thresholding. Based on connectedness and changes in intensity contours, dendronic representations of objects in images capture the coarse-to-fine unfolding of finer and finer detail, creating a unique signature for target objects that is invariant to lighting, scale, and placement of the object within the image. Subdendrones within the hierarchy are recognizable as objects within the picture. Complex composite images can be autonomously analyzed to determine if they contain the unique dendronic signatures of particular target objects of interest. In this paper, we describe the initial design of the dendronic image characterization environment (DICE) for the generation of dendronic signatures from complex multiband remote imagery. By comparing subdendrones within an image to dendronic signatures of target objects of interest, DICE can be used to match/retrieve target features from a library of composite images. The DICE framework can organize and support a number of alternative object recognition and comparison techniques, depending on the application domain. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 11, 243–253, 2000 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]