First Online Service for Automatic Visual Content Filtering Is Launched

London, UK -- (SBWire) -- 05/14/2009 -- The problem of adult or porn content becomes one of the main issues for the open Web. The task of processing and filtering the adult content occurs in search engines, social networks and photo sharing sites, whose activity highly depends on user generated content. Most important issue is that adult content can affect the corporate policy, brand recognition in the market, and sometimes lead to lawsuits. Public websites may suffer from adult content, because many users including children should not see it because of ethic, religious, social or psychological issues.

Existing adult content filters use text-based analysis, so they cannot restrict access to multimedia or social media sites, because the uploaded or displayed adult images may have no special words. Search engines use the embedded 'Safe search' mode, but it cannot ensure adult content restrictions because of the same issue - most of search engines analyse texts, not the images themselves. Moreover, text filters are too robust and can make mistakes detecting web sources with non-adult content but containing particular keywords.

To resolve the issue, web services appoint teams of content moderators who browse the content and detect the unwanted images manually. However, manual operations are time and cost consuming, and definitely not effective taking into account all financial, technical and operational issues. For small and medium-sized companies the problem even more acute because of the limited financial capabilities.

The only way to resolve the issue is using image-based solution, which is able to recognize unwanted content automatically.

Recogmission, a developer of Picollator universal search engine for cross-content search, launched the first online service piFilter.com for automatic adult content detection based on the advanced pattern recognition technologies developed by company for its global web search engine. The novelty of the service is that the content evaluation is done without manual intervention, and based on content analysis solely. Therefore the solution is language-independent, and it works for users from the North America, Europe, China, Brasil, Russia, Japan, Middle East and all other regions of the World.

Social networks, ISP, photo sharing sites or any small web site are able to connect to the service through the simple API and send the requests for processing on the basis of their own needs. The service offers multiple subscription options, while all of them are based on the natural idea – the customer pays only for service usage like pay-as-you-use. Most of tariffs depend on the number of requests processed for the customer, so the company of any size can benefit from using it.

Using the service allows web sites to reduce the costs from 5 to 100 times depending on the traffic. Service is of interest to any company with a public Internet resource or providing Internet access for fixed or mobile channels.