Satellite images of the suspected debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 would have needed a ''well trained pair of eyes'' to spot the object in the grainy images, says a satellite expert.
Andrew Dempster, the director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at the University of NSW, said the images taken of the search area in the southern Indian Ocean by low orbiting earth observation satellites would probably have been processed before they were usable.
While software was often used to clean up images used for weather observations, these systems were ''not normally looking for debris in oceans'', Professor Dempster said.
''This would be a human eyeball operation,'' he said. ''And there's a lot of ocean, so that would be a lot of poring over pictures.''
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Even after the images had been processed, the object suspected to be debris of the missing aircraft would have been difficult to spot.