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Hotel room image database to enable AI fight against human trafficking (arxiv.org)
3 points by davio on Feb 6, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A collection of over 1 million labeled hotel room photos from 50,000 hotels, mixing travel-site shots with phone photos, to help investigators match real-world images to a specific hotel. It also tests a standard image-recognition network with hotel-specific image distortions as a starting point.

Abstract · Hotels-50K: A Global Hotel Recognition Dataset

Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations. Images directly link victims to places and can help verify where victims have been trafficked, and where their traffickers might move them or others in the future. Recognizing the hotel from images is challenging because of low image quality, uncommon camera perspectives, large occlusions (often the victim), and the similarity of objects (e.g., furniture, art, bedding) across different hotel rooms. To support efforts towards this hotel recognition task, we have curated a dataset of over 1 million annotated hotel room images from 50,000 hotels. These images include professionally captured photographs from travel websites and crowd-sourced images from a mobile application, which are more similar to the types of images analyzed in real-world investigations. We present a baseline approach based on a standard network architecture and a collection of data-augmentation approaches tuned to this problem domain.

Abby Stylianou, Hong Xuan, Maya Shende, Jonathan Brandt, Richard Souvenir, Robert Pless
arXiv:1901.11397 · cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jan 26, 2019
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Too bad in most cases it is just used for prostitution stings. The definition of 'human trafficking' seems to involve the common consentual adult transaction, as well as common pimps, with much to say, but little to show against forced trade in humans that it implies.

A good idea, applied poorly. Just another part of the war on non-procreative sex by the modern social conservatives on both sides of the isle.