Video search specialist LTU Technologies has announced that it is to expand its current customer base by highlighting its potential to help media firms find copyrighted material. The company's Image Seeker engine has previously largely been used by law enforcement agencies to tackle child pornography and counterfeiting.
Television companies are taking an increasingly active stance against unauthorised use of their content in user-generated videos however, and LTU says that its technology will help scan social networking sites for illegal use of TV clips.
"When you're dealing with tens of millions of images... you need a way to automate that process of evaluating the known non-permissible content and focusing on very specific filtering criteria," Paul Kevin Smith of LTU told ComputerWorld.
The Image Seeker engine uses similar principles to the human eye to build up a directory of image attributes such as colour, shape, movement and texture said Mr Smith. This image 'DNA' is then used to scan through thousands of images for similar content.
"We are comparing that individual reference's DNA to a profile that has been built... of 50,000 images commonly identified as porn," Mr Smith added.
"The algorithms have been tuned to identify the content that is represented in each of those 50,000 images. We can feed back images that are consistently being missed as false positive or false negatives to train the algorithm... so the images will be caught in the future."
LTU Technology is currently partnered with a number of North American law enforcement agencies.
