Showing too much 'skin' detection in software

Question

I am building an ASP.NET web site where the users may upload photos of themselves. There could be thousands of photos uploaded every day. One thing my boss has asked a few time

Answer 1

As mentioned above by Bill (and Craig's google quote) statistical methods can be highly effective.

Two approaches you might want to look into are:

• Neural Networks
• Multi Variate Analysis (MVA)

The MVA approach would be to get a "representative sample" of acceptable pictures and of unacceptable pictures. The X data would be an array of bytes from each picture, the Y would be assigned by you as a 1 for unacceptable and a 0 for acceptable. Create a PLS model using this data. Run new data against the model and see how well it predicts the Y.

Rather than this binary approach you could have multiple Y's (e.g. 0=acceptable, 1=swimsuit/underwear, 2=pornographic)

To build the model you can look at open source software or there are a number of commercial packages available (although they are typically not cheap)

Because even the best statistical approaches are not perfect the idea of also including user feedback would probably be a good idea.

Good luck (and worst case you get to spend time collecting naughty pictures as an approved and paid activity!)