-Caveat Lector-
On 4 May 1999 17:47:12 GMT, in alt.paranet.ufo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(CircusMan) wrote:
Michael Braukus
Headquarters, Washington, DC May 4, 1999
(Phone: 202/358-1979)
Ed Medal
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL
(Phone: 256/544-0034)
Lynn Jenner
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-0045)
Doug Johnson
Department of Justice, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/307-0703)
RELEASE: 99-54
NASA WORKING TO IMPROVE CRIME-SCENE TECHNOLOGIES
Watch out, America's most wanted. NASA scientists are
developing promising new software technologies and instruments to
help law enforcement agencies catch criminals by improving the
analysis of crime-scene evidence.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, has
demonstrated software that enhances and improves dark, blurry
videotape -- technology used by law enforcement to study video of
the bombing at the1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. And NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, is working with the
National Institute of Justice to develop remote crime-scene
analysis.
Goddard and the National Institute of Justice will study how
remote-sensing technology -- used to study everything from crops
on Earth to galaxies millions of light-years away -- might allow
investigators in a central location to study a distant crime
scene. Criminologists may be able to identify everything from
fingerprints to gunpowder residue without disturbing a crime
scene, preserving the chain of evidence while saving time and
money.
In the Goddard study, a group of forensic scientists and law-
enforcement specialists will use instruments from NASA's Near
Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft to scan a crime scene. The
data can then be transferred to a remote location, allowing crime
experts to study a crime scene from anywhere in the world.
"This centralized type of crime scene examination could also
be of great importance to smaller cities and regions that do not
have the monetary resources for high-tech equipment and
personnel," said Institute Director Jeremy Travis. "The central
monitoring area would provide expertise to an entire region of the
country, not just larger cities."
The NASA partnership with the National Institute of Justice
"can have a major impact on the criminal justice system," said Dr.
Jacob Trombka, a scientist in Goddard's Laboratory for
Extraterrestrial Physics.
While scientists at Goddard develop remote crime-scene
technology, their colleagues at Marshall Space Flight Center have
taken software -- used by NASA to improve video for shuttle
launches and weather images -- and applied it to dark, nighttime
video used by police. When applied to video of the bombing at the
1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the software clarified handheld
camcorder video, revealing important details that had been
obscured.
The NASA video software "has the potential to stabilize
images so that criminals and other important clues can be
identified, even in blurred images," said Dr. Arsev H. Eraslan,
chief scientist of both the NASA National Technology Transfer
Center and the Office of Law Enforcement Technology and
Commercialization, Wheeling, WV.
NASA's video stabilization system has many advantages over
other systems being studied because it does more than just remove
static from videos.
"It's like a video eraser," said Marshall's Dr. David
Hathaway, one of the technology's inventors. "It removes defects
due to image jitter, image rotation and image zoom in video
sequences."
Once NASA's new software improves the video quality,
existing software can sharpen and "de-blur" images, further
enhancing video clarity.
"This technology has the potential to become a part of many
products, from those used by everyday Americans to those used by
sophisticated security and video production companies," said
Hathaway.
Marshall's Technology Transfer Office is working with the
inventors to license the technology so industry can turn it into a
commercial product.
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