The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is using technology developed by Google to fight online child pornography.

The video fingerprinting technology provided by Google will allow analysts at NCMEC to conduct faster searches of video and images in its database to flag files with child pornography. Other tools will allow analysts to quickly review video clips. 

www.MissingKids.com
(Photo Credit: NCMEC)

A group of Google engineers led by Dr. Shumeet Baluja have worked with federal agencies and NCMEC’s analysts in its Child Victim Identification Program to create software to automate the review of 13 million pornographic images and videos that had to be manually reviewed before the introduction of the technology.

Since it was established in 1984, NCMEC has worked with law enforcement agencies on more than 140,900 missing child cases, leading to the recovery of more than 124,500 children.

Baluja writes, “The keys here were organization, scalability, and search. In particular, the tools we provided will aid in organizing and indexing NCMEC’s information so that analysts can both deal with new images and videos more efficiently and also reference historical material more effectively.”

“We hope the tools we’ve built for NCMEC will help its analysts make the important and often time-sensitive work of investigating child predators faster and more efficient.”