Patch-based skin color detection and its application to pornography image filtering

Abstract

Along with the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, an immense industry for the production and consumption of pornography has grown. Though the censorship and legal restraints on pornography are discriminating in different historical, cultural and national contexts, selling pornography to minors is not allowed in most cases. Detecting human skin tone is of utmost importance in pornography image filtering algorithms. In this paper, we propose two patch-based skin color detection algorithms: regular patch and irregular patch skin color detection algorithms. On the basis of skin detection, we extract 31-dimensional features from the input image, and these features are fed into a random forest classifier. Our algorithm has been incorporated into an adult-content filtering infrastructure, and is now in active use for preventing minors from accessing pornographic images via mobile phones.