Article 6302 of comp.graphics:
>From: raveling@venera.isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: X-rated GIF files
Keywords: rude censorship
Message-ID: <8426@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 19 May 89 15:33:57 GMT
References: <6138@ux.cs.man.ac.uk> <283@indri.primate.wisc.edu> <10707@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Reply-To: raveling@venera.isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California
Lines: 53

In article <10707@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> bdiscoe@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (Ben W. Discoe) writes:
>>> In article <1380@zeus.unl.edu> steimle@zeus.unl.edu (Scott A.) writes:
>>>>Does anyone know of any sources for X-rated GIF files?  
>
>What is this, a convention of puritans?  The inquisition? 

	A different side to this is that some of the most challenging
	images for certain types of processing are the X-rated (or R-rated)
	sort.  For color quantization, they're more likely to have a large
	number of colors that need to be reproduced at high resolution
	in a relatively restricted volume of RGB space; these tend to be
	flesh tones in areas with a lighting density gradient.

	Another case, the one where I noticed this "value" of pinups
	& such, is in translating dithered monochrome images to
	grayscale.  The challenge here is to distinguish between
	dithered density gradients and features such as lines and
	edges that need to be retained at high contrast.

	To put it a different way by analogy to languages, images
	have both syntactic and semantic content.  There are some
	that have valuable syntactic content even though their
	semantic value is at best debatable.  Of course there are
	many with no particular value of either sort.

	As long as some significant fraction of viewers would be
	offended by accidentally viewing a given image, I believe it's
	appropriate to keep that image out of publicly accessible
	collections where they might encounter it.  Perhaps we should
	have different pools of images with X/R/G ratings advertised
	in advance.

	As for my personal view, it depends on the image.  My scale
	for acquired images runs about like this:

	    XXX		Yuch (call it porn) -- Deleted
	    XX		Distasteful, no "syntactic" value -- Deleted
	    X		Distasteful, but kept for algorithm testing
	    R		Sometimes mediocre to poor & deleted,
			Sometimes cute or artful or otherwise nice & kept;
			If marginally valuable, usually deleted.
	    G		Sometimes mediocre to poor & deleted,
			Sometimes valuable & kept.
			If marginally valuable, usually kept

	However, whatever's kept in the R & X classes is kept privately.
	The kept G images go into the image collection that's publicly
	available via venera.


----------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@isi.edu