Skip to main content
Log in

Fine-grained pornographic image recognition with multiple feature fusion transfer learning

  • Original Article
  • Published:
International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Image has become a main medium of Internet information dissemination, makes it easy for an Internet visitor to get pornographic images with just few clicks on websites. It is necessary to build pornographic image recognition systems since uncontrolled spreading of adult content could be harm to the adolescents. Previous solutions for pornographic image recognition are usually based on hand-crafted features like human skin color. Hand-crafted feature based methods are straightforward to understand and use but limited in specific situations. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based approach with multiple feature fusion transfer learning strategy. Firstly, we obtain the training data from an open data set called NSFW with 120,000+ images. Images would be classified into different levels according to its content sensitivity. Then we employ data augment methods, train a deep convolutional neural network to extract image features and conduct the classification job, without the need for hand-crafted rules. A pre-trained model is used to initialize the network and help extract the basic features. Furthermore, we propose a fusion method that makes use of multiple transfer learning models in inference, to improve the accuracy on the test set. The experimental results prove that our method achieves high accuracy on the pornographic image recognition and inspection task.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Short MB, Black L, Smith AH, Wetterneck CT, Wells DE (2012) A review of internet pornography use research: methodology and content from the past 10 years. Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw 15(1):13–23. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2010.0477

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Owens EW, Behun RJ, Manning JC, Reid RC (2012) The impact of internet pornography on adolescents: a review of the research. Sex Addict Compuls 19(1–2):99–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720162.2012.660431

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Manning JC (2006) The impact of internet pornography on marriage and the family: a review of the research. Sex Addict Compuls 13(2–3):131–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720160600870711

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Zaidan A, Karim HA, Ahmad N, Zaidan B, Sali A (2013) An automated anti-pornography system using a skin detector based on artificial intelligence: a review. Int J Pattern Recognit Artif Intell 27(04):1350012. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218001413500122

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton GE (2012) ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 1097–1105

  6. Szegedy C, Vanhoucke V, Ioffe S, Shlens J, Wojna Z (2016) Rethinking the inception architecture for computer vision. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2818–2826

  7. He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J (2016) Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 770–778

  8. Huang G, Liu Z, Van Der Maaten L, Weinberger KQ (2017) Densely connected convolutional networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 4700–4708

  9. Wang X, Cheng F, Wang S, Sun H, Liu G, Zhou C (2018) Adult image classification by a local-context aware network. In: 2018 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), IEEE, pp 2989–2993, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2018.8451366

  10. Zhu R, Wu X, Zhu B, Song L (2018) Application of pornographic images recognition based on depth learning. In: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Information Science and System, ACM, pp 152–155, https://doi.org/10.1145/3209914.3209946

  11. Nian F, Li T, Wang Y, Xu M, Wu J (2016) Pornographic image detection utilizing deep convolutional neural networks. Neurocomputing 210:283–293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2015.09.135

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Moustafa M (2015) Applying deep learning to classify pornographic images and videos. arXiv preprint arXiv:151108899

  13. Vitorino P, Avila S, Perez M, Rocha A (2018) Leveraging deep neural networks to fight child pornography in the age of social media. J Vis Commun Image Represent 50:303–313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvcir.2017.12.005

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Zhu H, Zhou S, Wang J, Yin Z (2007) An algorithm of pornographic image detection. In: Fourth International Conference on Image and Graphics (ICIG 2007), IEEE, pp 801–804, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIG.2007.29

  15. Srisaan C (2016) A classification of internet pornographic images. Int J Electron Commerce Stud 7(1):95–104. https://doi.org/10.7903/ijecs.1408

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Moreira DC, Fechine JM (2018) A machine learning-based forensic discriminator of pornographic and bikini images. In: 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), IEEE, pp 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2018.8489100

  17. Deselaers T, Pimenidis L, Ney H (2008) Bag-of-visual-words models for adult image classification and filtering. In: 2008 19th International Conference on pattern recognition, IEEE, pp 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPR.2008.4761366

  18. Avila S, Thome N, Cord M, Valle E, AraúJo ADA (2013) Pooling in image representation: the visual codeword point of view. Comput Vis Image Underst 117(5):453–465. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cviu.2012.09.007

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Zhuo L, Geng Z, Zhang J, Guang Li X (2016) ORB feature based web pornographic image recognition. Neurocomputing 173:511–517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2015.06.055

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Liu Y, Gu X, Huang L, Ouyang J, Liao M, Wu L (2019) Analyzing periodicity and saliency for adult video detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:190103462

  21. Tang S, Li J, Zhang Y, Xie C, Li M, Liu Y, Hua X, Zheng YT, Tang J, Chua TS (2009) Pornprobe: an lda-svm based pornography detection system. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, ACM, pp 1003–1004, https://doi.org/10.1145/1631272.1631490

  22. Liu Y, Xie H (2009) Constructing surf visual-words for pornographic images detection. In: 2009 12th International Conference on computers and information technology, IEEE, pp 404–407, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCIT.2009.5407272

  23. Yizhi L, Shouxun L, Sheng T, Yongdong Z (2010) Adult image detection combining bovw based on region of interest and color moments. In: International Conference on intelligent information processing, Springer, pp 316–325, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16327-2_38

  24. Zhang D, Zou L, Zhou X, He F (2018) Integrating feature selection and feature extraction methods with deep learning to predict clinical outcome of breast cancer. IEEE Access 6:28936–28944. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2837654

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Simonyan K, Zisserman A (2014) Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:14091556

  26. Szegedy C, Liu W, Jia Y, Sermanet P, Reed S, Anguelov D, Erhan D, Vanhoucke V, Rabinovich A (2015) Going deeper with convolutions. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 1–9

  27. Kim A (2019) NSFW dataset. https://github.com/alexkimxyz/nsfw_data_scraper. Accessed 1 Apr 2019

  28. Oquab M, Bottou L, Laptev I, Sivic J (2014) Learning and transferring mid-level image representations using convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 1717–1724

  29. Ioffe S, Szegedy C (2015) Batch normalization: Accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. arXiv preprint arXiv:150203167

  30. Glorot X, Bordes A, Bengio Y (2011) Deep sparse rectifier neural networks. In: Proceedings of the fourteenth International Conference on artificial intelligence and statistics, pp 315–323

  31. Pan SJ, Yang Q (2009) A survey on transfer learning. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 22(10):1345–1359. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2009.191

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Tan C, Sun F, Kong T, Zhang W, Yang C, Liu C (2018) A survey on deep transfer learning. In: International Conference on artificial neural networks, Springer, pp 270–279, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01424-7_27

  33. Srivastava N, Hinton G, Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Salakhutdinov R (2014) Dropout: a simple way to prevent neural networks from overfitting. J Mach Learn Res 15(1):1929–1958

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  34. Hu J, Shen L, Sun G (2018) Squeeze-and-excitation networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7132–7141

  35. Zeiler MD, Fergus R (2014) Visualizing and understanding convolutional networks. In: European Conference on computer vision, Springer, pp 818–833, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10590-1_53

  36. Paszke A, Gross S, Chintala S, Chanan G, Yang E, DeVito Z, Lin Z, Desmaison A, Antiga L, Lerer A (2017) Automatic differentiation in PyTorch. In: NIPS 2017 autodiff workshop: the future of gradient-based machine learning software and techniques

  37. Paszke A, Suhan A, Meurer A, Gross S (2019) Pretrained models from torchvision. https://github.com/pytorch/vision/tree/master/torchvision. Accessed 3 Apr 2019

  38. He T, Zhang Z, Zhang H, Zhang Z, Xie J, Li M (2019) Bag of tricks for image classification with convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 558–567

  39. Caetano C, Avila S, Guimaraes S, Araújo AdA (2014) Pornography detection using bossanova video descriptor. In: 2014 22nd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), IEEE, pp 1681–1685

  40. Agastya IMA, Setyanto A, Handayani DOD, et al. (2018) Convolutional neural network for pornographic images classification. In: 2018 Fourth International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication & Automation (ICACCA), IEEE, pp 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICACCAF.2018.8776843

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Key Research & Development Program of Zhejiang Province (No.2019C03127), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61972121, 61602140, 61702517), and the open fund of Engineering Research Center of Cognitive Healthcare of Zhejiang Province, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital (No. 2018KFJJ05). The authors would like to thank the reviewers in advance for their comments and suggestions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Feiwei Qin.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lin, X., Qin, F., Peng, Y. et al. Fine-grained pornographic image recognition with multiple feature fusion transfer learning. Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber. 12, 73–86 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-020-01157-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-020-01157-9

Keywords

Navigation