5 come up with software to fight porn, cyber abuse

Mumbai: A team of five aged 20 and 21 years who are currently studying in their fourth year of IT and computer science have come up with a software “dtoxed” to fight issues such as cyber bullying, cyber flashing, early exposure to pornography and cyber abuse, especially among children and women.

The software, once installed, will have a “blurring effect” on images and videos before being viewed or played by persons. Along with this, it will record details of the sender, which can be used while registering a complaint with the cyber police.

Harshit Rai, Vinay Vishwakarma, Vishwas Singh and Lalit Sinnarkar, are currently in their fourth year in IT at Fr. C. Rodrigues Institute of Technology, Navi Mumbai, while Prathamesh Patade is in his fourth year in Computer Science at Pillai College of Engineering, Panvel.

The five came together to create a software after a lecture of “deep learning”. Deep learning is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms.

According to Harshit, Dtoxed, pronounced as ‘Detoxed’, is a real-time, offline (local file system) as well as online (in-browser) censoring of explicit content present in the form of text, images and videos.

It uses content-based analysis, detection and censoring mechanism that enables detection and censoring of “bad” content. It uses deep learning and computer vision- based mechanism.

While explaining the mechanism of the software, Harshit (21), who himself has been a victim of cyber bullying, said, “Dtoxed aims to create a shield around the students, preventing them from reaching harmful components of the Internet. Even though there is cyber security and cyber police, tracing in today’s world is the most difficult thing to do.”

The team is currently being supported by CIBA (Centre for Incubation and Business Acceleration).