Google adapts YouTube's copyright-ID technology to combat child-porn

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Google has repurposed the high-tech digital fingerprinting technologies it uses to weed out infringing material from YouTube and has turned it into a powerful tool that can restrict child pornography. The company has teamed up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) based in Alexandria, Virginia to test the technology.

A handful of Google engineers redesigned a set of video and image analysis tools that can help in finding missing children as well as combat child pornography and abuse. The software is designed to find patterns in images and video, and the NCMEC will likely use it to track down child predators and trace missing or those children who are victims of abuse.

Since its inception in 1984, the private, non-profit NCMEC has reported more than 5,70,000 child exploitation leads to law enforcement agencies and has assisted with more than 1,40,900 missing child cases with the most important number of 1,24,500 children who have been recovered.

"Criminals are using cutting edge technology to commit their crimes of child sexual exploitation, and in fighting to solve those crimes and keep children safe, we must do the same," stated Ernie Allen, president and CEO of NCMEC.

"That is why we are so grateful to Google for providing new tools that will enable the National Center to better serve law enforcement in battling exploitation and rescuing children," Allen added, commending Google's contribution.

Shumeet Baluja, a research scientist and the head of the team of Google engineers said, "The keys here were organization, scalability and search. In particular, the tools have been designed to aid in organizing and indexing NCMEC's information so that analysts can deal with new images and videos more efficiently as also reference historical material more effectively."

According to Google, its aim in teaming up with the center's 'Technology Coalition against Child Pornography' is to develop solutions that would make it harder for people to use the Web to exploit children or traffic in child porn.

Back in August 2006, Google joined in with NCMEC's effort which was already working towards the cause with leading technology companies including Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Microsoft Corp.

Baluja realized the NCMEC could use a technology solution to sort through an ever-growing number of child pornography images, which are sent to the organization via the NCMEC CyberTipline and thereby recruited some fellow engineers who throughout 2007 devoted 20 percent of their workday to focus on the humanitarian effort.

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