Family Friendly Image Detection

@vidyaishayaNov 20.2014

Anyone know if there is an API somewhere to determine if an image is family-friendly?

Google likes to shut down AdSense accounts for websites displaying non-family-safe images;
so we’d like to determine (programatically) when an image is submitted on our (PHP-MySQL) website,
whether it is family-friendly or not. Seems like something a lot of people would want.

Thanks

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@Kevin2Nov 20.2014 — #Wow. Loaded question. Define "family-friendly". I'll bet you can't.

Family-friendly differs between cultures and even within cultures. For example, what's "family-friendly" in Germany is not in Bahrain. What's "family-friendly" to a fundamentalist Christian in the USA is not necessarily what may be shown on broadcast TV in the same country. Is "family-friendly" displaying a female's eyes only, or a string bikini? Or less? Or somewhere in between?

Now you may, with certain filters, be able to ban certain words in filenames (think [B]George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words"[/B]). There may also be a way of running some sort of OCR on images to find those same words. Photographs on the other hand are a very different challenge. Go back to the previous paragraph. The technical challenge here is overwhelming. It really comes down to eyeballs. At least currently. How do you tell if [B]car.jpg[/B] is a picture of a Ferrari or a naked woman? Or of a provocatively dressed woman on a Ferrari?

More than likely, Google/AdSense received some sort of complaint against a certain site, put eyeballs on it and discontinued service to that site. No API involved, just human judgement. After all, a certain US [B]Supreme Court Justice once said in regards to a similar case[/B], "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Not much of a definition, eh?

@tracknutNov 20.2014 — #Working on it.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/science/researchers-announce-breakthrough-in-content-recognition-software.html?_r=0

@Kevin2Nov 21.2014 — #Interesting and timely article, [B]tracknut[/B]. Here's what I think is pertinent to the OP (emphasis mine):
Computer vision specialists said that [...] these software systems had made only limited progress toward the goal of digitally duplicating human vision and, [B][I]even more elusive, understanding[/I][/B].[/quote]

Look, some law enforcement agencies have access to "facial recognition" software. That software, still in its infancy, relies on an enormous database of existing photographs with which to compare discrete points from a new photograph. Exposure is different, color is different, lighting angle is different, even the person in question is looking in a different direction. The computing power to deal with all those "different" variables is astounding. And that's just to decide whether or not one face in one photograph comes somewhat close to matching the face in another photograph. It doesn't make any value judgements such as "family-friendly". Hence my emphasis in the quote above.

@jedaisoulNov 23.2014 — #Anyone know if there is an API somewhere to determine if an image is family-friendly?
[/QUOTE]
The simple answer is "no, there isn't".

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