South Korea’s top online portal operator Naver Corp. will filter obscene images on its platform using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in an effort to prevent people from being involuntarily exposed to pornographic material.

According to the company on Monday, it will start to apply X-eye technology to its portal service to block the exposure of obscene images online. X-eye is machine learning-based AI technology that Naver has developed to monitor the display of sexually graphic photos on its portal in real time for 24 hours and filter them out.

To improve the accuracy of X-eye’s ability to detect pornographic images, the company has categorized a massive amount of still images that it has accumulated by shape over the past 10 months and has let the machine to review them. According to the company’s internal test with 4 million images that include both normal and obscene material, the rate of the latest Naver X-eye’s ability to detect pornographic images reached 98.1 percent.

The key to Naver’s image-filtering technology is the ability of its developer to categorize image data for machine learning, according to the company. Naver expects the detection accuracy of its X-eye would further improve as it collects more images and studies them. Obscene images that are to be blocked and referred to by Naver are based on the Safe Net rating of Korea Communications Commission, the company explained.

The company’s decision to incorporate its X-eye filtering solution comes as a growing number of people are complaining about unwanted graphic images, especially those embedded in online ads, that they have to encounter during web surfing.

Oh Kyung-soo, head of Naver’s user generated contents operations policy, said the company will enhance its X-eye so it can filter not only obscene still images but also moving images in the future. It is also considering offering an AI filtering program to other companies to help create an overall healthy Internet user environment.

By Cho Hee-young

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