Google builds software tools to help find child victims

Google has provided National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) with software tools to help them search and identify exploited children from millions of images.

NCMEC founded in 1984 has reported more than 570,000 child exploitation leads to law enforcement agencies and assisted with more than 140,900 missing child cases, resulting in the recovery of more than 124,500 children.

NCMEC through their phone and cyber tip lines receive more than 13 million child pornography images and videos to assist law enforcement agencies, working to identify and rescue children. It is too difficult a task to analyze this staggering amount of data manually.

Google wants to help NCMEC by sifting through the images, videos with their patented search technology and help identify the victims and predators.

To make the software tools useful and accessible to NCMEC, Google team led by Dr. Shumeet Baluja created a special software solution as part of 20 Percent Time project to track down the predators.

Ernie Allen, president and CEO of NCMEC said in a press release statement:

"Criminals are using cutting edge technology to commit their crimes of child sexual exploitation, and in fighting to solve those crimes and keep children safe, we must do the same…That is why we are so grateful to Google for providing new tools that will enable the National Center to better serve law enforcement in battling exploitation and rescuing children."

The Google technology will help NCMEC analysts to quickly and easily search the computers to sort and identify files that contain images of children. Google’s new video tools will then help search the video snippets from the video files captured and will compare it with the photographs to identify the victims. This process is automated to make the job easier for NCMEC to find victims and predators.

Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research at Google said in a press statement:

"At Google, we are focused on creating innovative technology to organize information and have expertise in computer processing of images…The tools we've built for NCMEC will allow its analysts to more efficiently and accurately manage the task of sifting through the videos and images they have collected."

In August 2006, Google joined the Technology Coalition and the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, industry initiatives launched by NCMEC and its sister agency, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, to develop solutions that disrupt the ability of predators to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography.

Google also has donated a Google Search Appliance, Google Earth Enterprise and free ads via Google Grants to help support NCMEC’s programs and mission.