Computer Scientist Receives 2006 Kerley Award
from Office of Technology Transfer
|  Image
above: 2006
Kerley Award winner James Tilton (center) pictured
with members of the Kerley family at the GSFC Office
of Technology Transfer’s 14th Annual New Technology
Reporting Program (Photo credit: Debora
McCallum/GSFC).
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On
April 4, GSFC’s Deputy Director Michael Ryschkewitsch
presented James Tilton, a computer scientist of
CISTO’s Information Science and Technology
Research group, with the GSFC Office of Technology
Transfer’s James Kerley Award. Presented
annually, the award is named after the late James
Kerley, a GSFC researcher who was a prolific inventor
and a champion of technology transfer. Tilton received
the 2006 Kerley Award for his efforts to find new
uses for a software program he originally developed
for remote sensing applications.
Tilton’s innovation, the Hierarchical Segmentation
(HSEG) software, provides a new approach to image analysis.
Rather than analyzing the image on a pixel-by-pixel
basis, this software organizes the image pixels into
regions. |
“Looking at the regions instead of the individual
pixels allows the user to isolate specific features that otherwise are
impossible to distinguish,” explained Ryschkewitsch. For example,
in a satellite image, the software can indicate different types of vegetation,
distinguishing a golf course from a park from the woods.”
The HSEG software, and its follow-on known as “RHSEG” (Recursive
Hierarchical Segmentation), have a broad spectrum of applications and
have been incorporated into a commercial medical imaging product (see “CISTO
Engineer Receives Patent and IS&T Award,” CISTO News,
Summer 2005). The software is now being used to assist
in the diagnosis and management of diseases that are imaged using digital
x-rays, mammograms, ultrasounds, MRI images, and CAT scans. Other non-medical
applications for HSEG/RHSEG include agricultural crop monitoring, identifying
population densities and areas with greatest expansion, facial recognition,
and data mining.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/pdf/147429main_GV2_7_Web.pdf
http://techtransfer.gsfc.nasa.gov/SS-rhseg.html
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