My interest in CAPTCHAS never seems to vane. And now theres reCAPTCHA!! And its very interesting to understand how its put to use.
It is estimated that around 60 million captchas are solved every day, each involving around 10 seconds. That roughly translates into 170,000 hours of work! Those are some astounding figures. The essential idea behind ReCaptcha is to constructively channelise this huge amount of work.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
This cool feature can be added to your website/blog, as also in the form of MailHide to mask your email id, thus helping the cause of digitizing valuable knowledge.
Showing posts with label CAPTCHA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CAPTCHA. Show all posts
Oct 6, 2008
Mar 7, 2008
ASSIRA - from Microsoft Research
I failed yet another test today. I tried creating a user account on LifeRay and the CAPTCHA got me. I incorrectly deciphered a 'Z' to be a '2'. Some of the blogs I visit have these annoying tests to pass before I can leave a comment.
Microsoft Research's latest offering - ASSIRA ((Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access)- seems to be a fun test to take. You just need to say if the image displayed is a cat or a dog. And the images are cute. And the database is huge - over 3 milllion images.
Microsoft admits that it is not the first time that image recognition tests have been devised, citing past effort like PIX CAPTCHA and KittenAuth suggesting that their limitations was essentially the number of images in the database. Interestingly Microsoft also admits to be partly 'inspired' by HotCaptcha (I leave it to you to visit their website to figure out how HotCaptcha is supposed to work :-)).
To quote technicals from the Microsoft page:
"It's easy to add an Asirra HIP to your web site. Microsoft Research is providing it as a free web service. Be warned that Asirra is still in beta-testing; the service and its API may both be unstable.
Asirra consists of two components:
1. A JavaScript client component that you add to your web page inside a form. Our code will add an Asirra challenge to your web page. If the challenge is solved correctly, the client code gets an Asirra Ticket from our server, and adds it to your form as a hidden input field.
2. A web service at Microsoft Research that your form processor should call each time a user form is submitted, to check that the ticket provided is valid. "
Microsoft Research's latest offering - ASSIRA ((Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access)- seems to be a fun test to take. You just need to say if the image displayed is a cat or a dog. And the images are cute. And the database is huge - over 3 milllion images.
Microsoft admits that it is not the first time that image recognition tests have been devised, citing past effort like PIX CAPTCHA and KittenAuth suggesting that their limitations was essentially the number of images in the database. Interestingly Microsoft also admits to be partly 'inspired' by HotCaptcha (I leave it to you to visit their website to figure out how HotCaptcha is supposed to work :-)).
To quote technicals from the Microsoft page:
"It's easy to add an Asirra HIP to your web site. Microsoft Research is providing it as a free web service. Be warned that Asirra is still in beta-testing; the service and its API may both be unstable.
Asirra consists of two components:
1. A JavaScript client component that you add to your web page inside a form. Our code will add an Asirra challenge to your web page. If the challenge is solved correctly, the client code gets an Asirra Ticket from our server, and adds it to your form as a hidden input field.
2. A web service at Microsoft Research that your form processor should call each time a user form is submitted, to check that the ticket provided is valid. "
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)