Finding Child Porn And Daily Show Clips… Without Hashes Or Keywords

Smith notes that in order to properly classify newly discovered images as pornographic, the database must constantly be updated to stay on top of the latest porn trends. Over the course of the last 20 months, this has meant that the database has been jammed with animated porn and low-quality cell phone porn, both of which have exploded in popularity online.

In child porn investigations, this sort of database might be useful for turning up images, but police generally will use a more specific law enforcement database of child porn images to see if something similar turns up on the suspect's computer. They can also seed the database with specific images of a child and then search for matches.

LTU already counts the French police, the Italian police, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security among its worldwide customers.

More than a porn filter

Such tools can also be useful in the enterprise. Last week, LTU launched Image-Seeker 2.0, which features additional tools that make it easy to use the technology to keep an eye on corporate networks. It's not just about technology (though this is a real issue for companies). It's also about violent images, corporate blueprints, and trade secrets; Smith claims that if you can define something visually, Image-Seeker can build a profile to help find it.

Accuracy obviously depends on the type of content, the database used to train the engine, and the kind of search being run. Smith claims 90 percent accuracy out of the box, though this is often tuned for specific deployments. "Customers are understanding that 90 to 95 percent accuracy is generally pretty good," he says. And companies or law-enforcement agencies that want to deploy such technology need to understand that a machine alone will never do all the work. At best, the computer can filter out the extremes, present likely matches, and can then let humans focus on making the necessary decisions.