Large Scale Image-Based Adult-Content Filtering

As more people start using the Internet and more content is placed online, the chances that individuals will encounter inappropriate or unwanted adult-oriented content increases. This paper presents a practical and scalable method to efficiently detect many adult-content images, specifically pornographic images. We currently use this system in a search engine that covers a large fraction of the images on the WWW. For each image, face detection is applied and a number of summary features are computed; the results are then fed to a support vector machine for classification. The results show that a significant fraction of adult-content images can be detected. 1