Child pornography may end soon with abuse prevention software

“With novel pattern-recognition processes,desCRY rummages through digital photos and videos in search of illegal content,no matter how well-hidden it may be,” Nickolay said.

The heart of the software consists of intelligent pattern-recognition algorithms that automatically analyses and classifies images and video sequences.

“Technologies such as facial and skin-tone recognition are combined with contextual and scene analyses to identify suspicious content,” Raul Vicente-Garcia,the project manager,said.

The software searches all of the files in a computer,e-mail attachments and archives included and the search result is displayed in an image viewer that can accommodate several hundred photos as tiny icons visible at a glance.

Suspicious photos are singled out,for instance by displaying them at the top of the list of results,and investigators can enlarge the images with a click of the mouse,while a second mouse click stores them as evidence.

At the end of the analysis process,an investigator must determine whether the photos classified as illegal really contain prohibited content.