Spam can be defined as unsolicited bulk email. In an effort to evade
text-based filters, spammers sometimes embed spam text in an image, which is
referred to as image spam. In this research, we consider the problem of image
spam detection, based on image analysis. We apply convolutional neural networks
(CNN) to this problem, we compare the results obtained using CNNs to other
machine learning techniques, and we compare our results to previous related
work. We consider both real-world image spam and challenging image spam-like
datasets. Our results improve on previous work by employing CNNs based on a
novel feature set consisting of a combination of the raw image and Canny edges.