1 Introduction

In Paturel et al. (1996), we presented our program of collecting the main astrophysical parameters for the principal galaxies. The first target was limited to adding information on galaxies already known in the LEDA database.

The work is now more ambitious because we are aiming at detecting new galaxies from the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky (hereafter DENIS). DENIS is a program to survey the entire southern sky in three wavelength bands (Gunn-i: 0.80 $\mu$m, J: 1.25 $\mu$m and Ks: 2.15 $\mu$m) with limiting magnitudes of 18.5, 16.5 and 14.0 respectively. The observations are performed with the ESO 1 m-telescope at La Silla (Chile) with a dedicated camera. The survey observations with three channels started in routine mode in December 1995. A detailed description of DENIS is given in Epchtein (1998) and in Garzón et al. (1997).

The systematic detection, extraction and cataloging of DENIS extragalactic sources are of significant interest for studies requiring large and homogeneous samples such as the kinematics of the local universe, the distance scale, cosmology etc. The I-band is the most suitable both for the detection of extended objects and for the star/galaxy separation, except in the galactic plane. Thus, in the present study only the I-band images are considered.

The transfer of DENIS images from Paris to Lyon is explained in Sect. 2 and the extraction of objects from these images in Sect. 3. In Sects. 4 to 5 we describe astrometry and automatic galaxy recognition and analysis. Then, in Sects. 6 to 8, we explain how galaxies are cross-identified with LEDA galaxies leading to the comparison of astrophysical parameters with those from Mathewson et al. and from LEDA. Finally, in Sect. 9 we describe the provisional I-band DENIS catalog.

It is important to note that a deeper catalog will be made at the end of the survey. Hence, the present catalog is a preliminary catalog of bright galaxies detected by DENIS, and used to start a radio and spectrographic follow-up long before the end of the survey. The present measurements cover one year of observation.