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.