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Michael Braukus
Headquarters, Washington                   March 26, 2003
(Phone: 202/358-1979)

Jerry Berg
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
(Phone: 256/544-0034)

Edward Campion
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-0697)

RELEASE: 03-120

NASA SELECTS COMMERCIAL & GOVERNMENT INVENTIONS OF THE YEAR

     Software technology, proven to be invaluable for law 
enforcement investigations, and a mathematical method 
received NASA's Commercial and Government Invention of the 
Year Awards.

The Video Image Stabilization and Registration System 
(VISAR) received NASA's Commercial Invention of the Year. 
The basis for this innovative technology was created by NASA 
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., employees, 
Dr. David Hathaway, a solar physicist, and Paul Meyer, an 
atmospheric scientist, to aid their space-program research.

In response to a FBI request for assistance, this video 
enhancement technology was developed into VISAR. It was 
first used in 1996 to help the FBI analyze video of the 
bombing at the Olympic Summer Games in Atlanta. Since then 
Hathaway and Meyer have worked on more than a dozen criminal 
cases with police and the FBI.

VISAR works by turning dark, jittery images; captured by 
home video, security systems and video cameras in police 
cars, into clearer, stable images that reveal clues about 
crimes. It does what other image stabilization processes 
cannot, correct for changes in orientation and size. The 
system is also being used in the Space Shuttle Columbia 
Accident Investigation.

The winner of the NASA Government Invention of the Year is a 
mathematical method called Computer Implemented Empirical 
Mode Decomposition Method, also known as the Hilbert-Huang 
Transformation (HHT) Method. Dr. Norden E. Huang, Director, 
Goddard Institute of Data Analysis at NASA's Goddard Space 
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md, invented it.

The HHT Method has many diverse applications. The Method can 
be applied in a variety of fields to study things such as: 
basic nonlinear mechanics, climate cycles, solar neutrinos 
variations, earthquake engineering, geophysical exploration, 
submarine design, structural damage detection, satellite 
data analysis, nonlinear wave evolution, turbulence flow, 
blood pressure variations and heart arrhythmia.

This Method is also used to analyze sea surface temperature 
data collected by NASA satellites and instruments. The 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses Huang's 
method to analyze images from some of its Earth orbiting 
spacecraft. It has proven successful in connecting 
environmental changes to El Nino phenomena with weather 
changes.

Huang also won NASA's Exceptional Space Act Award in 1999, 
for which he was cited, "as having invented one of the most 
important applied mathematical methods in NASA's history," 
for his invention of the HHT Method. 

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