Edwards engineer receives high-level recognition

  • Published
  • By Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Berg
  • 31st Test and Evaluation Squadron
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  In front of the humbling backdrop of the first F-22 Raptor and a combat veteran RQ-4 Global Hawk, Maj.Gregory Meyer was recognized for his contribution to the Air Force in science and technology during a ceremony at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
 
The August 3 ceremony, jointly hosted by the Under Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Sue Payton, and the Chief Scientist of the Air Force, Dr. Mark Lewis, honored the contributions of teams and individuals in the areas of science, technology, and engineering. General Bruce Carlson, Air Force Materiel Command commander kicked off the ceremony by thanking and congratulating the award recipients. 

"These are the men and women who will ensure we remain the world's greatest air and space force throughout the 21st Century," General Carlson said. 

Major Meyer was presented with the Air Force Research and Development Award for his work in developing and testing an innovative imagery processing algorithm. The Weighted Adaptive Iterative Statistical Threshold algorithm takes an image and separates high-intensity target pixels from background or clutter pixels. Major Meyer led a test effort that demonstrated the ability to segment every target of military interest in over one thousand test images. In over 1,000 trials, it segmented the targets correctly over 95 percent of the time. 

Due to the increased performance of Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sensors and the volume of data subsequently processed, it has become impractical to have a human manually separate, classify, and identify targets from collection sources. As autonomous targeting algorithms evolve, they continue to outperform the human with increased frequency. Major Meyer began testing WAIST on Block 10 Global Hawk imagery. The WAIST algorithm was given seeker data and competed against humans analyzing same-scene, high-resolution digital images. In every scene, the algorithm extracted a higher percentage of the pixels making up the target than the human analyst, and did so approximately 100 times quicker. 

In addition to the ability to support classification on targets of military interest, the WAIST algorithm can be extended to various other applications. In a civilian application, using mammograms of varying quality, the algorithm highlighted areas of interest aiding doctors in breast cancer detection. Due to its ability to segment targets of interest from noisy backgrounds and clutter for any video image and its demonstrated versatility against any type of sensor imagery, the Air Force has applied for a patent for this algorithm. 

Major Meyer was accompanied at the ceremony by his father, William Meyer of The Villages, a small central Florida community, and several close relatives from the Cincinnati, Ohio area. "I'm glad all that money we spent on college was finally put to good use," said his proud father jokingly after the ceremony. 

Major Meyer is currently the Flight Commander, RQ-4 Operational Test for the 31st Test and Evaluation Squadron and also fills the role of RQ-4 Block 40 Test Director.