Technology keeps getting faster, but I wonder if it is fast enough to do real-time image processing to filter out pornography?  More on this idea soon, but let me first explain why the question came up.

My wife is studying CIPA (the Child Internet Protection Act) as part of her Marriage and Family Therapy degree.  As she pointed out, it’s always a tricky bit of legislation to get right since it’s easy to be too lax for the sake of First Amendment rights or too strict for the sake of the children.

I suggested perhaps the solution to the ambiguity inherent in English words would be to create an open-source filtering package as part of the bill.  Let concerned parents who are also programmers get together to define a specification and a software program that would be the Gold Standard.  Vague words such as “obscene” would yield themselves to the specifics of an algorithm, and the software included in the bill could become a standard for libraries and schools.

So back to the idea of real-time image processing.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product that even attempts this, but why not create an adapter that sits in between the VGA cord of a computer monitor and the video card itself?  This “adapter” would have to be a computer in its own right, of course—it would have to process the incoming image in real-time at 60 or so frames per second, and match nudity patterns in the pixels.  It would then draw black boxes in place of the obscene images.  The pixel buffer, in its modified form, would then be delivered to the monitor, (sans the nudity).

The benefits of such a technique would be threefold: (1) the source of the obscenity would be irrelevant—whether it came from the internet, a disk, or even a drawing, it would be filtered out; (2) there would be no need to keep a long “white” or “black” list of internet sites because all obscene images would be filtered out in an even-handed way (3) as a hardware solution, there would be no tampering with it unless physically tampered with.

Figure 1: An attempt to show a VGA cable with a black box in the middle.

Note: There is a network-based hardware solution that is similar to this idea called iBoss, but this is not the same technology. iBoss seems like it’s worth a look, however, if you’re looking for a hardware solution and don’t need my vaporware :)

Posted via email from Duane’s Quick Posts