SAN FRANCISCO—Google Inc. is enlisting the same
image-recognition technology the company uses to trace copyright violations on
its YouTube video site to fight online child pornography, the company said.
Google said it is working with the National Center for
Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) of Alexandria, Virginia to help automate
and streamline how child protection workers troll through millions of
pornographic images to identify victims of abuse.
The project is applying so-called video fingerprinting
technology, which Google has been urging media copyright holders to adopt as a
means for policing widespread piracy of professionally created video programming
on the Web.
Small teams of Google engineers have worked for more than a
year with federal agencies and NCMEC’s analysts in its Child Victim
Identification Program to create software to automate the review of some 13
million pornographic images and videos that analysts at the center previously
had to review manually.
The Google technology promises to let analysts more quickly
search the center’s video and image databases to identify files that contain
images of child pornography victims. Other tools from Google also help analysts
quickly review video snippets.
Shumeet Baluja, a research scientist at Google said in a company statement he
had recruited a handful of fellow engineers to create the video detection tools
as a side project to their day jobs during the course of 2007. He describes the
work in a company blog post at tinyurl.com/63n64m/. – Reuters
