Image Matters: Detecting Offensive and Non-Compliant Content / Logo in Product Images

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 machine learning driven offensive and non-compliant image detection system for extremely large e-commerce catalogs. This system proactively detects and removes such content before they are published to the customer-facing website. This paper delves into the unique challenges of applying machine learning to real-world data from retail domain with hundreds of millions of product images. We demonstrate how we resolve the issue of non-compliant content that appears across tens of thousands of product categories. We also describe how we deal with the sheer variety in which each single non-compliant scenario appears. This paper showcases a number of practical yet unique approaches such as representative training data creation that are critical to solve an extremely rarely occurring problem. In summary, our system combines state-of-the-art image classification and object detection techniques, and fine tunes them with internal data to develop a solution customized for a massive, diverse, and constantly evolving product catalog.