The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced on Wednesday the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance technology designed to identify and detect digital sexual exploitation content targeting children and adolescents. The technology is expected to combat digital crimes against youth by providing continuous, automated monitoring and detection around the clock.
The technology leverages facial recognition to predict gender and age and identifies exploitation content through objects and language cues, such as school uniforms. The detection speed has been drastically reduced from two hours to just one minute and thirty seconds, improving accuracy and efficiency in removing harmful content.
The Seoul Institute, a research center affiliated with the Seoul city government, began developing this AI surveillance technology in March last year and completed the project this month. This initiative builds on the city government’s earlier efforts, which introduced AI technology for automatic surveillance and tracking of digital crimes last year.
The newly developed technology can determine whether the victim in sexual exploitation content is a minor or an adult. This capability is crucial, as many cases involving minors go unreported due to the victim’s reluctance to inform their parents about the crime. The AI system uses deep learning to recognize age and gender, even without apparent facial features, by identifying contextual objects such as books, uniforms, and dolls and analyzing text and language commonly used by teenagers.
The city government has partnered with the Seoul Digital Sexual Crime Relief Support Center to deploy this “Child and Youth Digital Sexual Crime AI Surveillance System” in the field. The system aims to enhance the city’s 24-hour monitoring and deletion operations, providing rapid identification and removal of child and youth sexual exploitation materials. Authorities anticipate that this technology will reduce the recirculation of exploitative videos and better support victims of digital sex crimes.
According to the Seoul Digital Sex Crime Victim Support Center, only 7.8 percent of digital sex crimes against youth are reported by victims, underscoring the need for proactive measures. Due to the rapid spread of digital sexual exploitation content, it often evades timely investigation. Under the Act on the Protection of Children and Youth against Sex Offenses, sexually exploitative material featuring minors can be immediately removed from platforms without needing consent from the victims or their parents.
The newly developed “AI Surveillance System for Digital Sex Crimes Against Children and Youth” leverages deep learning-based facial recognition to determine the age and gender of minors accurately.
Even when faces are not visible, the system analyzes contextual objects such as books, school uniforms, toys, and on-screen text and language commonly used by youth. This technology enables swift identification and preemptive deletion of content displaying the sexual exploitation of minors.
Remarkably, the AI system can detect illegal video content in just 90 seconds from keyword input, an improvement over the previous two-hour manual search process. This enhancement represents an 80-fold increase in detection speed and a more than 300 percent improvement in accuracy. With this new system, the city can monitor up to 300,000 cases, doubling the number of cases managed manually last year. The Seoul Metropolitan Government anticipates that accuracy and speed will continue to improve as the AI system learns and accumulates more data.
