Algorithm Knows Who's Naked Online
Software could save family-friendly websites from grueling hours of image checks.
If your website is part of the estimated 96 percent of the Internet struggling to get by without adult images, you may have staked your fortune on making sure the content is family friendly. But policing every image that makes its way through your servers is a grind. Enter the cutely named Isitnude.com to test that old business axiom about finding a need a filling it.
Launched this week by Algorithmia, the software gives users a simple way to answer the question posed in its URL. The algorithim uses existing work on identifying skin patches in images, then adding hand gesture recognition, face and nose detection, and skin tone range guidance to make sure the program wouldn’t confuse a picture of a bare foot for one of a bare man.
“A customer came to us trying to run a site that needs to be kid-friendly,” Algorithmia CTO Kenny Daniel tells Wired, explaining the origins of the idea.
If I could stop giggling long enough after half-hour or so testing images for the appropriate journalistic diligence, I’d say he had a winner.
