A geophysicist at the Institut Français du Pétrole (IFP), André Fontanel specialised in optical information processing and photo-interpretation applied to geophysics. Around 1970 he developed methods for correlating and analysing aerial photographs through coherent-light (laser) diffraction, published in Geophysical Prospecting and presented at international photo-interpretation symposia. His work belongs to remote sensing applied to subsurface resource prospecting. In À la découverte de la Terre (1974) he contributed the section on the recording techniques of the photographic emulsions used in space imaging.