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

I know either Flickr or Picasa has implemented this. I believe the routine was called FleshFinder.

A tip on the architecture of doing this:

Run this as a windows service separate from the ASP.NET Pipeline, instead of analyzing images in real time, create a queue of new images that are uploaded for the service to work through.

You can use the normal System.Drawing stuff if you want, but if you really need to process a lot of images, it would be better to use native code and a high performance graphics library and P/invoke the routine from your service.

As resources are available, process images in the background and flag ones that are suspicious for editors review, this should prune down the number of images to review significantly, while not annoying people who upload pictures of skin colored houses.

Answer 2

See the seminal paper "Finding Naked People" by Fleck/Forsyth published in ECCV. (Advanced).

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html