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What is the best way to programmatically detect porn images?

Asked 2009-04-03T09:39:51.557
120

Akismet does an amazing job at detecting spam comments. But comments are not the only form of spam these days. What if I wanted something like akismet to automatically detect porn images on a social networking site which allows users to upload their pics, avatars, etc?

There are already a few image based search engines as well as face recognition stuff available so I am assuming it wouldn't be rocket science and it could be done. However, I have no clue regarding how that stuff works and how I should go about it if I want to develop it from scratch.

How should I get started?

Is there any open source project for this going on?

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2 Answers

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I would rather allow users report on bad images. Image recognition development can take too much efforts and time and won't be as much as accurate as human eyes. It's much cheaper to outsource that moderation job.

Take a look at: Amazon Mechanical Turk

"The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

answered 2009-04-03T09:42:41.500
1

Two options I can think of (though neither of them is programatically detecting porn):

  1. Block all uploaded images until one of your administrators has looked at them. There's no reason why this should take a long time: you could write some software that shows 10 images a second, almost as a movie - even at this speed, it's easy for a human being to spot a potentially pornographic image. Then you rewind in this software and have a closer look.
  2. Add the usual "flag this image as inappropriate" option.
answered 2009-04-03T12:53:15.163

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