Why Your Streaming Platform Needs Automated Nudity Filtering

The abundance of platforms spawns tons of content that media companies and users generate on a daily basis.

But with huge volumes of content created on a variety of platforms, moderating it and protecting the users from unwanted information becomes a hassle.

In this article, we will talk about how automation can help optimize that process and make it more effective.

Nudity censorship in video content

With the freedom of artistic expression, the producers no longer shy away from showing nudity or adult content in their movies and shows. Big roles in that were played by HBO and Netflix with such classics as The Wire, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and Sex Education.

But all of the platforms that companies are targeting might have different censoring practices. Let’s take a look at the reasons why platforms have to introduce nudity filtering.

• Geographical censoring. If a streaming platform is looking to expand beyond the local markets, it has to keep in mind censoring laws of the target markets. For example, countries like Germany, Australia, or Arab countries might have stricter restrictions when it comes to nudity.
• Social media content moderation. Social platforms are a great way to gain new audiences and brand recognition since it naturally possesses a larger audience. But that larger audience also includes underaged viewers who must be protected from adult content. On top of that, adult users can also find nude images inappropriate — nobody wants to come across the content of that sort while scrolling the news feed on public transportation.

The baseline of all that is the content has to be adapted to specific audiences, so in many cases, nude scenes might be unacceptable and have to be filtered.

How do streaming services and broadcasters go about nudity filtering?

To make sure that the video content can be viewed by the widest audience possible, media companies invest in manual content filtering: according to CNBC, YouTube outsources the moderation process to third-party companies, while TikTok hires the specialists directly.

When it comes down to nudity censoring in video content, there are basically two major ways in which media companies filter it. Let’s talk about them in more detail.

Editing the adult content out

Sometimes TV channels, broadcasters, or streaming platforms simply go through the footage and edit out all of the scenes that might have nudity. The downside of that approach is that the flow of the story might get affected.

That approach is often utilized by streaming services like Disney+, which present themselves as a family-friendly platform. Airline companies like Delta that license movies for their passengers to watch while on a flight also apply nudity filtering to appeal to the widest audience.

Hiding the nudity

Also, the content providers can use technology to hide the portions of the scene which contain nudity without cutting the whole scene.

There are two ways in which adult content can be hidden:

• Overlaying a blur over the whole scene or the nude parts of the body. With social media like Reddit that allow nude content, the whole post would often be blurred to prevent the user from seeing it unalarmed.
• Using CGI to cover the inappropriate parts with different objects on the scene. For example, Netflix has done this with the movie Splash: they have applied CGI to make Daryl Hannah’s hair longer so that it covered her backside.

That’s how the process works in movies and TV shows. The workflow here is quite straightforward in terms of finding and filtering nude content: the platform licenses a movie or a series from a production firm and then has a media asset management company going through the footage and editing all of the inappropriate parts.

And there are also social media platforms that have to hire content moderators to go analyze huge volumes of content constantly generated by the users.

All of that time and effort required to identify and filter the nudity from video content is the problem.

With all of the videos uploaded to the internet and all the television that is coming out — some media companies average at 500-1000 new movies a month— it is frankly impossible for human moderators to go through each and every piece of content.

And we can not forget the human factor of manual nudity filtering: nobody is protected from missing a scene or two.

With most audiences there is really no room for error: you don’t want to show a nude scene during a family-friendly evening broadcast or allow adult content on a streaming platform that is accessed by both adults and children.

The cost of error in this regard is quite literal: for example, in 2003 USA Federal Communications Commission fined 44 ABC stations $1.4 million for a nude scene in a show called NYPD Blue.

The solution to that problem would be a way to automatically analyze any video content, find the scene containing nudity, and edit it.

Here’s how we can do that by relying on AI-powered nudity filtering tools.

Automated nudity filtering with Cognitive Mill™

Integrated into your video production process, CoginitiveNude completely automates unsafe content detection in any type of video content. Let’s take a look at the features of an AI-powered nudity detection tool.

Automation

Cognitive Mill™ does not require human assistance to moderate video content. It works automatically from analyzing the footage to presenting the user with a moderation decision.

Accuracy

We use frame-precise video clustering technology to identify nude content on a scene level far more accurately. It also can be tuned to your exact rules and needs to deliver even more precise results.

Speed

An automated nudity filtering tool goes through the footage much faster than a human and also keeps the accuracy consistent. For example, while an average moderator would spend around 200 minutes on editing a single movie, Cognitive Mill™ does that in just 5 minutes.

Integration

We seamlessly build the nudity moderation tool into your video production pipeline to make sure that you are not jumping back and forth between different pieces of software.

Speaking of streamlining your workflow — aside from automated nudity filtering, we also provide tools of the CognitiveMill cloud platform that allow you to automate other aspects of video production. A couple of examples include:

• Credits detection that lets users safely skip them without missing important content;
• Highlights generator that cuts the sporting event into a compilation of high drama moments.

Content awareness

Cognitive Mill™ can chew through any video format and protocol, and is great for processing regular video and live streams. Different genres of the video are also no problem for it.

Scalability

We offer a cloud infrastructure that is easily scalable over hundreds of minutes of video content processed. So whatever the scale you are working on — we can cover it.

We offer a flexible and powerful automated nudity filtering solution that features countless applications and spares you the time on manual content moderation.

Stacking up against the nudity filtering competition

But let’s take a moment to see what other nudity detection services offer.

As you may expect, there are a ton of software solutions from different vendors that can analyze the video footage and find nude content there.

How is Cognitive Mill™ different then?

The answer is simple: competing automated nudity filtering tools recognize the adult content by analyzing the footage frame by frame with Artificial Intelligence, and present the users with a probability score.

Basically, the tool tells you the percentage of how much it is sure that the frame contains nudity.

And here’s where we do things differently.

Cognitive Mill™ applies a scene-based approach to mark the content that might be potentially unsafe, like suggestive nudity, sexual activities, or pornography. And instead of the probability score, the tool provides clustered nudity filtering metadata with a complete decision on whether the content is safe or unsafe. That means that the user does not have to analyze the data afterward.

And that is not all. After identifying the nude content, Cognitive Mill™ can also edit it — you can have it hide the unsafe content with a blur or cut the nudity out automatically.

Get your content filtered for nudity with ease

When targeting wider audiences in terms of demographics or geographics, broadcasting companies, streaming platforms, or social media have to keep in mind appropriate censorship rules.

And that means that most of the time a media company has to filter nudity in all of the content that it offers.

But going through countless hours of movies, TV shows, and meme compilations is very tiring and ineffective. Therefore, the demand for automated nudity filtering tools rises.

Cognitive Mill™ offers a completely automated way to analyze footage of any type and detect unsafe content with a great degree of accuracy. We utilize video-clustering technology and Artificial Intelligence to recognize nude content on a scene level, as well as automatically edit it out.

If you are looking to set a nudity filtering workflow — reach us at support@cognitivemill.com or use the form below. We will set the whole system up quickly and scale it to fit your needs.