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Automatic Detection of Human Nudes

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Abstract

This paper demonstrates an automatic system for telling whether there are human nudes present in an image. The system marks skin-like pixels using combined color and texture properties. These skin regions are then fed to a specialized grouper, which attempts to group a human figure using geometric constraints on human structure. If the grouper finds a sufficiently complex structure, the system decides a human is present. The approach is shown to be effective for a wide range of shades and colors of skin and human configurations. This approach offers an alternate view of object recognition, where an object model is an organized collection of grouping hints obtained from a combination of constraints on color and texture and constraints on geometric properties such as the structure of individual parts and the relationships between parts. The system demonstrates excellent performance on a test set of 565 uncontrolled images of human nudes, mostly obtained from the internet, and 4289 assorted control images, drawn from a wide variety of sources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720

    D.A. Forsyth

  2. Computer Science Department, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA, 91711

    M.M. Fleck

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  1. D.A. Forsyth
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  2. M.M. Fleck
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Forsyth, D., Fleck, M. Automatic Detection of Human Nudes. International Journal of Computer Vision 32, 63–77 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008145029462

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