CSA-Graphs: A Privacy-Preserving Structural Dataset for Child Sexual Abuse Research

arXiv cs.CV / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces CSA-Graphs, a privacy-preserving structural dataset aimed at enabling computer vision research for child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI) classification despite legal and ethical barriers to sharing original images.
  • Instead of distributing explicit visual content, CSA-Graphs provides structural representations—scene graphs capturing object relationships and skeleton graphs encoding human pose—to preserve contextual signals without releasing raw imagery.
  • Experiments indicate that each modality remains useful for CSAI classification, and that combining scene graphs with skeleton graphs improves performance further.
  • The authors position the dataset as a way to improve reproducibility and accelerate automated methods for child safety while staying compliant with restrictions on sensitive data.

Abstract

Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) classification is an important yet challenging problem for computer vision research due to the strict legal and ethical restrictions that prevent the public sharing of CSAI datasets. This limitation hinders reproducibility and slows progress in developing automated methods. In this work, we introduce CSA-Graphs, a privacy-preserving structural dataset. Instead of releasing the original images, we provide structural representations that remove explicit visual content while preserving contextual information. CSA-Graphs includes two complementary graph-based modalities: scene graphs describing object relationships and skeleton graphs encoding human pose. Experiments show that both representations retain useful information for classifying CSAI, and that combining them further improves performance. This dataset enables broader research on computer vision methods for child safety while respecting legal and ethical constraints.