Advanced image recognition is at the heart of a new initiative by Microsoft and researchers at Dartmouth to help identify and remove child-exploitation pictures online. eSecurity Planet has the story.
A team of computer scientists from Microsoft and Dartmouth College, along with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), have come up with a way to automate the detection and location of child pornography on the Internet.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), which initially developed the technology, is donating what it calls PhotoDNA to NCMEC to help it root out images of children being sexually abused by predators — and to get them off the Web.
Representatives of all three bodies made the announcement Wednesday in a conference call with members of the press.
Scientists at the software giant’s Microsoft Research (MSR) division first created PhotoDNA, which underwent later refinement with help from Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor of computer science at Dartmouth.