Researchers are engaged in the development of methodology and technology to allow doctors to identify and diagnose skin cancers at an early stage or provide a means for security agents to detect or recognize weapons or suspicious objects. With techniques such as edge detection, 2D image enhancement with Laplacian and gradient operators, Fourier transforms and the FFT, filtering and wavelets, image analysis, processing, and recognition research has application in many fields, including but not limited to medicine, agriculture, satellite imagery and national security.