An article in The Wall Street Journal (see link in Post-Gazette) examines how photo sites, such as Photobucket and MySpace, have to review huge numbers of images — including those from camera phones — to remove inappropriate images…..and to help convince advertisers their imaging sites are appropriate for ad dollars.
The article looks at human versus computer image filtering, and computers don't
come out on top. The report doesn’t specifically highlight camera phones — although they are mentioned — but the explosion of camera phone use obviously is resulting in an explosion of uploaded images.
Photobucket has information on its Web site about uploading images from a cellular phone.
Hmm, I wonder if anyone has published statistics about the percentage and/or number of camera phone images versus digital camera images uploaded to various photo sharing and social networking sites (see top left; Wall Street Journal chart).
Photobucket’s review
Almost four million images (photos and videos) every day are uploaded to Photobucket. The article highlights the image sharing service (see below) where Jeff Gers, an employee, can examine almost 150,000 images — about 300 a minute — on his computer during his eight hour work day.
“He's come across pornographic snowmen, camera-phone snapshots of young people's anatomy and, quite frequently, an animated cartoon of a girl lifting her shirt. Occasionally, he sees child pornography,” the article says.
Social networking tie-in
Photobucket is one of the major sources of photos that appear on the social networking site MySpace.
The WSJ notes, “MySpace's ability to sell advertising, its primary source of income, depends in part on scouring the site for objectionable material. As part of that effort, MySpace last year contacted other sites that help users post material online, most notably Photobucket, and asked them to launch cleanups of their own.”
Photobucket has 30 people working full time on monitoring images and will spend $1 million during the next year on the effort. The company can monitor more than half the images and wants to be able to check all of them.
Computer versus human
Computers are able to check a large number of photos. But their ability to differentiate among images that are and aren’t acceptable doesn’t compare with a human’s.
Both Photobucket and MySpace have compared human/computer filtering. “Scientists don't yet understand how humans pick relevant information from a picture and discard the other details,” the article says.
“As a result, no one has had much success programming a computer to do the same thing.”
Fine line of filtering
In addition, computers have a hard time determining determining what isn’t pornographic but is still inappropriate.
Referring to Photobucket, The Wall Street Journal says, “The censors are told to kill anything that might not appear in a mainstream magazine, an admittedly loose standard.
"A bare bottom is not OK, but a bare bottom showing even a tiny sliver of thong underwear is fine. A cartoon that uses the word ‘nigga’ is OK but one that uses ‘nigger’ is not.
“Nipples and genitals painted or tattooed to look innocent are definitely flagged.”
Comments