Bag-of-visual-words models for adult image classification and filtering

We present a method to classify images into different categories of pornographic content to create a system for filtering pornographic images from network traffic. Although different systems for this application were presented in the past, most of these systems are based on simple skin colour features and have rather poor performance. Recent advances in the image recognition field in particular for the classification of objects have shown that bag-of-visual-words-approaches are a good method for many image classification problems. The system we present here, is based on this approach, uses a task-specific visual vocabulary and is trained and evaluated on an image database of 8500 images from different categories. It is shown that it clearly outperforms earlier systems on this dataset and further evaluation on two novel web-traffic collections shows the good performance of the proposed system.