The process of galaxy classification thus far described is a manual exercise where an observer attempts to sort a galaxy into its appropriate stage, family, variety, outer ring classification, etc., by visual inspection alone. For a small number of observers, this has been done for as many as 14,000 galaxies by Nair & Abraham (2010) and 48,000 galaxies by Schawinski et al. (2007), while for a large number of observers working in concert (e.g., the Galaxy Zoo project) it has been done for a million galaxies. But critical to such ventures is the preparation of images for classification, and a need for a homogeneous, objective approach to very large numbers of galaxies. This has led to extensive application of automated methods for classifying galaxies. For example, Nair & Abraham (2010) visually classified galaxies into coded bins for the purpose of training an automatic classification algorithm.
(The remainder of this part will be found in the printed publication.)