The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) created the Beacon Project as a means of testing the willingness of data holders to share genetic data in the simplest technical context-a query for the presence of a specified nucleotide at a given position within a chromosome. Each participating site (or "beacon") is responsible for assuring that genomic data are exposed through the Beacon service only with the permission of the individual to whom the data pertains and in accordance with the GA4GH policy and standards.While recognizing the inference risks associated with large-scale data aggregation, and the fact that some beacons contain sensitive phenotypic associations that increase privacy risk, the GA4GH adjudged the risk of re-identification based on the binary yes/no allele-presence query responses as acceptable. However, recent work demonstrated that, given a beacon with specific characteristics (including relatively small sample size and an adversary who possesses an individual's whole genome sequence), the individual's membership in a beacon can be inferred through repeated queries for variants present in the individual's genome.In this paper, we propose three practical strategies for reducing re-identification risks in beacons. The first two strategies manipulate the beacon such that the presence of rare alleles is obscured; the third strategy budgets the number of accesses per user for each individual genome. Using a beacon containing data from the 1000 Genomes Project, we demonstrate that the proposed strategies can effectively reduce re-identification risk in beacon-like datasets.

This paper surveys the legal and regulatory environment surrounding copyright protection technologies, focusing on China in particular. The paper begins with a discussion of some of the interactions between law and technology in copyright protection, which has led to the creation of international treaties to protect the technologies that protect copyrights. A comparison of the various national responses to these conventions is presented, followed by a discussion of the structure and development of the relatively advanced Chinese system for copyright protection technology. The last section outlines some of the unique challenges that have arisen in China for copyright protection technologies and the businesses that depend upon them.

Assumptions about image continuity lead to oversmoothed edges in common image interpolation algorithms. A wavelet-based interpolation method that imposes no continuity constraints is introduced. The algorithm estimates the regularity of edges by measuring the decay of wavelet transform coefficients across scales and preserves the underlying regularity by extrapolating a new subband to be used in image resynthesis. The algorithm produces visibly sharper edges than traditional techniques and exhibits an average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement of 2.5 dB over bilinear and bicubic techniques.

Uniform quantization of wavelet coefficients introduces perceptually disturbing artifacts by decreasing the visual smoothness. In this paper, the local Holder regularity is used to quantify these changes in visual smoothness. A modified uniform quantization scheme that constrains local regularity reduction is proposed. The quantizer modification is applicable to any uniform quantization scheme and requires no additional side information to be transmitted to the decoder, unlike standard deadzone quantizers. The reconstructed images show a noticeable perceptual improvement as well as an increased PSNR relative to uniform quantization.

Common image interpolation methods assume that the underlying signal is continuous and may require that it possess one or more continuous derivatives. These assumptions are not generally true of natural images, most of which have instantaneous luminance transitions at the boundaries between objects. Continuity requirements on the interpolating function produce interpolated images with oversmoothed edges. To avoid this effect, a wavelet-based interpolation method that imposes no continuity constraints is introduced. The algorithm estimates the regularity of edges by measuring the decay of wavelet transform coefficients across scales and attempts to preserve the underlying regularity by extrapolating a new subband to be used in image resynthesis. The algorithm produces noticeably sharper edges than traditional techniques and exhibits an average PSNR improvement of 2.5 dB over bilinear and bicubic techniques.

The uniform quantizers used in typical wavelet image compression algorithms can introduce perceptually disturbing artifacts by decreasing visual smoothness. In this paper, we use local Holder regularity to quantify changes in visual smoothness and propose a modified quantization scheme which constrains local regularity decreases. The reconstructed images show a significant perceptual improvement as well as an increased PSNR.

This paper investigates the design of M-band linear phase wavelet filter banks (M>2), and explores their application to image coding. The generalized LOT description of M-band linear-phase paraunitary filter banks is used to parametrize the M-band linear-phase orthogonal wavelets. It is proven that an M-band linear-phase orthogonal wavelet of even length cannot have more than one vanishing moment. Since this limits the effectiveness of the resulting wavelet filters, we next suggest methods for the construction of linear-phase biorthogonal M-band wavelet lowpass filters, generalizing prior 2-band constructions. However, one cannot guarantee that an arbitrary lowpass filter pair can be completed to a full perfect-reconstruction filter bank. Finally, the new linear-phase orthogonal wavelet filter banks are compared with known wavelet filters with regard to their performance in a transform-based image coder.