Image detection methods and apparatus

A method for designating whether a given email is a spam email, comprising:

• extracting a set of email components from said given email, at least a first component of said set of email components is an image;
• ascertaining whether said first component is a spam component, including
• normalizing said first component, including performing a lossy compression on one of said first component and a processed version of said first component;
• comparing said lossy representation of said first component with a reference representation, said reference representation being a version of a reference spam image after said reference spam image has undergone a similar normalizing process as said normalizing;
• if said lossy representation of said first component matches said reference representation, performing anti-spam measures with respect to said given email.

An article of manufacture embodying a computer readable medium storing computer readable code configured for designating a given image as similar or dissimilar with respect to a reference image, comprising:

• computer readable code for normalizing said image including performing pre-processing and a lossy compression on said given image to obtain a lossy representation of said image, said pre-processing including at least one of cropping, fundamental extracting to identify color and/or texture employed to present spam text, gray scale converting and lower color bit converting;
• computer readable code comparing said lossy representation of said given image with a reference representation, said reference representation being a version of a reference spam image after said reference spam image has undergone a similar normalizing process as said normalizing;
• computer readable code designating, if said lossy representation of said given image matches said reference representation, said given image similar to said reference image;
• and
• computer readable code designating, if said lossy representation of said given image does not match said reference representation, said given image dissimilar to said reference image.