(Click to enlarge)

The American multinational corporation and one of the world’s most valuable companies, Microsoft, in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has innovated a New Image DNA Technology to fight against child abuse.

PhotoDNA is an image-matching technology developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Dartmouth College. It creates a unique signature for a digital image, something like a fingerprint, which can be compared with the signatures of other images to find copies of that image. NCMEC and online service providers such as Microsoft and Facebook currently use PhotoDNA to help find, report and eliminate some of the worst known images of child pornography online, helping identify thousands of these horrific images that would previously have gone undetected.