Identifying nude pictures
David Alexander Forsyth, Margaret M. Fleck · 2002
This paper demonstrates an automatic system for telling whether there are naked people present in an image. The approach combines color and texture properties to obtain a mask for skin regions, which is shown to be effective for a wide range of shades and colors of skin. These skin regions are then fed to a specialized grouper, which attempts to group a human figure using geometric constraints on human structure. This approach introduces a new view of object recognition, where an object model is an organized collection of grouping hints obtained from a combination of constraints on color and texture and constraints on geometric properties such as the structure of individual parts and the relationships between parts. The system demonstrates excellent performance on a test set of 565 uncontrolled images of naked people, mostly obtained from the internet, and 4289 assorted control images, drawn from a wide collection of sources.