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What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

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Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#11

Post by eksith »

RossM wrote: post #7
eksith wrote: post #3

To this day, I believe the best method for picking out these images is a human censor (with appropriate, company provided, counseling afterward). Edit: No shortage of stock image reviewer jobs https://google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22image%20reviewer%22 I'm trying to find an interview of one of these people describing what it's like on the other end. It wasn't a pleasant story. These folks are employed by the likes of Fa…

I seem to remember reading an article about people doing this at Google(?) in a pretty poor state. Edit: I think it was this one: http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler...

Yep! That's the one. Thanks.

A pretty unpleasant job no matter what angle you look at it.

I remember this bit the most : "Google covered one session with a government-appointed therapist — and encouraged me to go out and get my own therapy after I left."

This is the down side to 'abstracting away' the dirty end of filtering. I'm looking forward to a day when this can be properly automated, but, considering the ever-changing nature of erotica to begin with, I don't see that happening any time soon.

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#12

Post by hugofirth »

Whilst I agree that programmatically eliminating porn images is a very hard problem. Programmatically filtering porn websites might be easier, beyond just a simple key word search and whitelist.

If you assume that porn tends to cluster, rather than exist in isolation, then a crawl of other images on the source pages , applying computer vision techniques, should allow you to block pages that score above a threshold number of positive results (thus accounting for inaccuracy and false positives).

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#13

Post by VLM »

This is probably going to get downvoted, but if lots of people are not overzealous puritans and want some skin, the best overall system design that maximizes happiness and profit is probably sharding into

puritanweirdos.example.com with no skin showing between toes and top of turtleneck (edited to add no pokies either)

and

normalpeople.example.com with 99% of the human race

The best solution to a problem involving computers is sometimes computer related, but sometimes is social. The puritans are never going to get along with the normal people anyway, so its not like sharding them is going to hurt.

Another way to hack the system is not to hire or accept holier than thou puritans. Personality doesn't mesh with the team, doesn't fit culture, etc. You have to draw the line somewhere, and weirdos on either end should get cut, so no CP or animals at one extreme, and no holy rollers on the other extreme.

The final social hack is its kind of like dealing with bullies via appeasement. So they're blocking reasonable stuff today, tomorrow they want to block all women not wearing burkhas or depictions of women damaging their ovaries by driving. Appeasing bullies never really works in the long run, so why bother starting. "If you claim not to like it, or at least enjoy telling everyone else repeatedly how you claim not to like it, stop looking at it so much, case closed"

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#14

Post by cvshepherd »

i've read about these skin tone filters more than once now, and i'm really curious to find out if these take all possible skin tones into consideration (i can't really imagine that they do. escpecially dark skin tones would get way too many false positives, would they not?).

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#15

Post by _mulder_ »

selmnoo wrote: post #9
phorese wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So i can literally get paid for looking at porn. Huh, who knew... :)

At the cost of your mental health, sure. I recall reading an article about the human workers who had this job at Google... they had crap benefits, crap pay, and no mental healthcare. As a result a lot of the people in the field had depression and other mental issues.

Source?.... or any hints as to what the article was called. Sounds interesting.

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#17

Post by romain_g »

selmnoo wrote: post #9
phorese wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So i can literally get paid for looking at porn. Huh, who knew... :)

At the cost of your mental health, sure. I recall reading an article about the human workers who had this job at Google... they had crap benefits, crap pay, and no mental healthcare. As a result a lot of the people in the field had depression and other mental issues.

Would it be this one? http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler...

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#18

Post by VLM »

Nobody has discussed i18n and l10n issues? What passes for pr0n in SF is a bit different than tx.us and thats different from .eu and from .sa (sa is saudi arabia not south africa, although they've probably got some interesting cultural norms too)

If you're trying for "must not offend any human being on the planet" then you've got an AI problem that exceeds even my own human intelligence problem to figure out. Especially when it extends past pr0n and into stuff like satire, is that just some dudes weird self portrait, or a satire of the prophet, and are you qualified to figure it out?

Re: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

#20

Post by betterunix »

How about a picture of a woman's breasts? What about an erect penis? Sounds like porn, but you might also see these things in the context of health-related pictures or some other educational material.

The classic problem of trying to filter pornography is trying to separate it from information about human bodies. I suspect that doing this with images will be even harder than doing it with text.

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