An increasing amount of information being transmitted over the Internet isin image form. This trend includes medical images used in diagnosis and research, and other materials for which it is desirable to avoid violations of security and privacy. While privacy and secuity control of textual materials has long been a focus of research activities, images present new and more challenging problems. Filtering of images in addition to text becmes more essential as modern computing and communications facilitates the use of information in image form. This project proposes to provide image filtering capabilities to complement other means of checking the contents of documents. The domain of interest is electronic medical records, but the research products are expected to be generalizable to other domains of interest. The effort will forcus on developing further wavelet-based algorithms for searching medical image databases and retrieving relevant information from multimedia medical databases; extracting textual information from images; advancing practices for the protection of privacy and implementing a security mediator; and exploring WWW interfaces for security mediators.
