Marshall's VISAR Has Many Applications

On January 26, 2000, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center announced in the Federal Register that NASA intends to license its new state-of-the-art video processing method for hardware applications. Specifically, two major electronic hardware design companies are currently in negotiations with NASA for the rights to produce high-speed electronics for the next generation of real-time digital camcorders and image processing platforms. Nearly $100 million in product revenue has been projected.

Licensing to electronic hardware companies is exciting, but that's only half the story. NASA's most acclaimed video enhancement method-VISAR-is now being offered by NASA for licensing to consumer software companies as well. This unique partnership strategy involving dual hardware-software fields is the result of another unique partnership-NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and Research Triangle Institute.

As NASA's contracted technology commercialization partner, Research Triangle Institute (RTI) has played a significant role with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in achieving technology commercialization success. As license agreements are being drawn up for the rights to produce the VISAR method in electronic hardware for digital camcorders and other real-time devices, NASA and RTI are continuing forward by marketing the method to software producers. The resulting software products will be invaluable for enhancing video taken by police car cameras and home camcorders.

VISAR (Video Image Registration and Stabilization) achieved initial praise for its unparalleled performance during the bombing investigation at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Many home video tapes taken at the site just before and after the bombing needed enhancing to reveal any potential clues. When existing methods fell short, law enforcement officials sought help from U.S. federal laboratories and, ultimately, NASA. At NASA, this challenging task was assigned to researchers David Hathaway and Paul Meyer-two experts in global and solar image processing. VISAR was the result, and it has been in demand by the law enforcement, military, surveillance and medical industries ever since.

Now VISAR exists as a Windows-based program prototype requiring less than 300 kilobytes of hard storage, and its ease of use has been demonstrated to many avid supporters. VISAR's patent-pending techniques are considered to be the first to perform image registration and enhancement in the presence of both camera zoom and rotation effects-even when the background and foreground move at different rates.

In real-time applications, VISAR hardware has the potential to become a standard among video methods, similar to Dolby methods in the audio world. In addition to digital camcorders, hardware developers plan to place VISAR into real-time applications such as military targeting and moving medical imaging. Software, however, for post-processing video taken by home users and law enforcement, is expected to be the largest market for VISAR; and, these desktop computer products could actually be the first embodiments of VISAR to reach the marketplace.