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Detecting Nudity With AI and OpenCV

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the swapping-out-the-interns dept.

mikejuk writes: AI gets put to some strange tasks. Not satisfied with the Turing test or inventing Skynet, Algorithmia have put together a nudity detector. Take one face detector from OpenCV and use it to find a nose. Take the skin color from the nose and then see what parts of the body are skin colored in the photo. If there is lot of skin color shout NUDE! Actually, the website lets you put in your own photos and classifies them into Rude or Good and gives you a confidence estimate. Obama with his top off — no problem but the familiar image processing test photo of Lena the pin up girl rates a 'Rude'.

15 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Nude == Rude? by dskoll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why does "Nude" equate to "Rude"? Oh right, I forgot... we're afraid of our bodies and spooked by healthy sexuality.

    1. Re:Nude == Rude? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why does "Nude" equate to "Rude"? Oh right, I forgot... we're afraid of our bodies and spooked by healthy sexuality.

      Puritanism is the State Religion.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
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    2. Re:Nude == Rude? by dskoll · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right, because a 5-year-old is traumatized by stumbling across a picture of a nude dude, but is perfectly fine watching 15 people a day being blown away violently on prime-time television shows.

      OMG, think of the CHILDREN! What if she accidentally sees a PENIS? OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!

      And what if young Bobby accidentally sees a boob? OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!

    3. Re:Nude == Rude? by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If I were to seek out your daughter specifically, and whip out my penis right in front of her, that would lean towards pedo tendencies & you'd be right. I'd feel the same way if I had a young daughter.

      Now if I were to walk along the street naked, go about my own business not bothering anyone, and your daughter would happen to see me in that state, please explain to me how this would 'hurt' her?

      Hint: you can't, because it doesn't. More likely the contrary (as in: seeing a naked body every now & then lets kids grow up to be healthy adults). As has been shown at least a few times in serious studies.

      The difference here is only in how I would behave towards your daughter (and other people), regardless of being naked or not. If I'm rude, then I'm rude, even with clothes on. If I'm polite, then I'm polite, even if naked.

      Although a lot more sensitive, essentially the same thing goes for human sexuality. Suppressing that from public view screws people up more badly than satisfying healthy curiosity on the subject. Or letting people have their pr0n, if they want it.

      So GP is right, there is nothing inherently wrong about showing or seeing a naked body. The 'problem' with that is a cultural one, how society deals with it.

    4. Re:Nude == Rude? by dunkelfalke · · Score: 4, Informative

      Except that puritan daughters are far more likely to get pregnant as teens. Just saying.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
    5. Re:Nude == Rude? by dskoll · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Ummm... wtf? Actually, religiosity in the US is correlated with teen pregnancy rates.

      Top 10 states by percentage identifying as "very religious" are Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Oklahoma.

      Top 10 states by teen pregnancy rates are: New Mexico, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, Delaware, South Carolina and Hawaii.

      So 5 of the top 10 religious states are also in the top 10 for teen pregnancy.

      Now please cite studies showing that "bombarding children with sexuality" (whatever that means) causes teen pregnancy,

    6. Re:Nude == Rude? by shmlco · · Score: 5, Informative

      In 2008, the Washington Post reported on a University of Washington study which found that teenagers who received comprehensive sex education were 60% less likely to get pregnant than someone who received abstinence-only education.

      A 2007 federal report found that abstinence-only programs have had "no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence," reported ThinkProgress.

      In a 2011 study published in the journal PLOS One, researchers found a similar correlation between a state's commitment to abstinence education and pregnancy rates.

      One of the most interesting and notable examples of this phenomenon comes out of Texas, which, according to ThinkProgess, has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country and a track record of strict abstinence-only education.

      --
      Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
    7. Re:Nude == Rude? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I remember back when I was 14, raised in my fundamentalist protestant christian community. No playboy magazine. No masturbation without guilt. Sexual desire was lust, which was a sin, and I was supposed to resist temptation and ask for forgiveness.

      We had no sexual outlets. So, we played with the girls every chance we got. And they were just as eager, because they were in the same boat. The moment the grown-ups weren't around, neither were the clothes. Did I mention we did not have access to condoms, pills, or any form of birth control at all?

      I am damn lucky I didn't knock anyone up. The only reason, in fact, that I didn't get someone preggo was because I DID learn (in a single akward conversation that does not qualify as sex education) the barest basics of how babies were made. Obviously, such an event would get us caught, so we played in every way we could other than that. Well some of us did, anyway. A few got pregnant.

      *THIS* is not healthy or safe for the kids. It is not even sane. Educate those kids. Every fact they have is a fact they can use to make wise choices. And for God's sakes give them access to free condoms...not to condone sexuality, but to protect the especially hormonal ones from the life-destroying consequences that otherwise result.

      Also, let go of your ridiculous notions of childhood innocence. It's a fantasy you make up. We were all dirty old men at the age of about six.

  2. What is this "Nude" you speak of? by pubwvj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But what is this "Nude" you speak of?

    Sex based: guy in a bottoms only swim suit vs a topless woman?

    Country based: French nude beach vs USA prudes?

    Era based: Someone from the 1920's looking at a 2015 bikini?

    Age based: Young child (often completely nude in some countries is okay) vs post puberty (often requires hiding genitals and nipples on females in some countries)?

    Religious based: Whoa! Some religions are very conservative and others require nude dancing around the May pole...

    Seasonal: Have you ever tried being nude in a northern Vermont or Siberian winter!?! Don't even think about showing the tip of your nose!

  3. Rude ? by aepervius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I understand classifying as nude or safe, or whatnot, but rude ? Since when is nudity rude ?

    --
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    visit randi.org
  4. Re:And it performs poorly..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    anyone using such technology would require an extremely low false negative score... but too many false positives can make the system unusable. one of my last projects at undergraduate university was pretty much the exact same "nudity confidence" test as this project... my project "worked pretty well" also, but was equally unusable. i dialed all the parameters for a week until i got the best results on a giant dataset (millions of images)... one of the sources of images was every image from the university website (over 10,000 images just from that). so, after the tweaking, false negatives were low, but still 5% of negatives were wrong. i don't remember exact numbers, but i think of the positives, 10-15% of those were wrong. i didn't use any libraries or facial recognition, but i imagine that would help a lot... one problem is obviously if the face isn't in the picture. my technique was using a wide range of skin tones and then looking for "blobs" of similarly toned pixels and looking for shapes or shapes in shapes... (nipples on breasts were a pretty solid indicator and easy to scan for... also detecting a crotch region with dark hair... obviously a fat man in a hair-toned thong would trigger alarms)

    so, after all of this, many variables are weighted to give a single "confidence" score... so i decided to run the test a final time before the presentation the next day (it took many hours to run)... i built lots of top lists, one of them was overall confidence of nudity... the #1 picture most confident of containing a nude body ended up being the faculty office picture of one of the lecturers in the computer science department, who would be attending the talk. the office walls were a skin tone, and the way the light came in the window and lined up with her head, and round shaped things on her desk reflecting the skin tones, triggered every single test i had built. out of millions of pictures... too funny. good closer for the presentation.

  5. Wrong idea: too much skin colors. by MouseTheLuckyDog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Looking for too much skin color is a bad way to test for nudes.
    You don't get to nudity untill you start seeing colors that are not the skin color.

  6. aesthetically, maybe? by killfixx · · Score: 4, Informative

    FTFA, "ascetically pleasing"... hehehe

    I don't think that word means what you think it means. :)

    ascetic: A person who renounces material comforts and leads a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious devotion.

    Although, I guess nudity would be the highest form asceticism...

     

    --
    "Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
  7. Excellent by cfalcon · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm glad that AI has learned to spot tits. I'm sure this will only be used for moral purposes, like enforcing our ban on nipples that are on a chick (biological or trans), or a dude who has chick breasts (as in to win a bet). Everyone knows that nipples rot the minds of children, which in why they cannot speak until after weaning. It's science!

    It is my fondest hope that our robot overlords appreciate a nice rack. That will make the slaving in the rare earth mines a little more tolerable, at least.

  8. Re:And it performs poorly..... by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    (nipples on breasts were a pretty solid indicator and easy to scan for... also detecting a crotch region with dark hair... obviously a fat man in a hair-toned thong would trigger alarms)

    What's wrong with (female) nipples on breasts? Are they more naked than a man with a naked upper body? Should the woman be covered while the man can freely go around without something to cover his chest? There is absolutely nothing wrong with female breasts. They are not sexual objects. Treating them like that is just demeaning, both to women and men.

    Well my nipples, in fact, are sexual objects. My wife's were, too, until she had a kid. Then, not so much. Not at all, in fact.

    --
    "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
    --- Jerry Garcia