Scalable Detection of Offensive and Non-compliant Content / Logo in Product Images

Shreyansh Gandhi, Samrat Kokkula, Abon Chaudhuri, Alessandro Magnani, Theban Stanley, Behzad Ahmadi, Venkatesh Kandaswamy, Omer Ovenc, Shie Mannor; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 2247-2256

In e-commerce, product content, especially product images have a significant influence on a customer's journey from product discovery to evaluation and finally, purchase decision. Since many e-commerce retailers sell items from other third-party marketplace sellers besides their own, the content published by both internal and external content creators needs to be monitored and enriched, wherever possible. Despite guidelines and warnings, product listings that contain offensive and non-compliant images continue to enter catalogs. Offensive and non-compliant content can include a wide range of objects, logos, and banners conveying violent, sexually explicit, racist, or promotional messages. Such images can severely damage the customer experience, lead to legal issues, and erode the company brand. In this paper, we present a computer vision driven offensive and non-compliant image detection system for extremely large image datasets. This paper delves into the unique challenges of applying deep learning to real-world product image data from retail world. We demonstrate how we resolve a number of technical challenges such as lack of training data, severe class imbalance, fine-grained class definitions etc. using a number of practical yet unique technical strategies. Our system combines state-of-the-art image classification and object detection techniques with budgeted crowdsourcing to develop a solution customized for a massive, diverse, and constantly evolving product catalog.