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January 21 2011
Newsflash for Chatroulette Flashers: Your Days Are Numbered
Online flashers could soon be out of a hobby, thanks to a team of software engineers from the University of Colorado. The team is developing a system called SafeVchat, which is meant to detect and filter out obscene images, foiling even the fastest of flashers.
The team tested their algorithms at Chatroulette, the infamous online video-chat service that lets you communicate with randomly-selected strangers, and the results looked good.
As you can probably guess, the problem with seeing video images of random strangers is that some of these people are all-too-eager to show off their flesh. Despite the age restrictions on some video-chat sites and the noble-yet-feeble first attempts at creating filtering software, flashers still peddle their wares with ease and have seemed as unstoppable as a bad rash.
But not for long. Enter the engineers.
With SafeVchat, Xingu Ying and his research team have created algorithms that monitor the harbingers of flashing, and wipe away the video output whenever it detects too much flesh. As New Scientist reports:
First, they detect facial features – eyes, nose and mouth – in the video because many “misbehaving users” hide their ...
