Wednesday, June 13, 2007

ReCaptcha

I came across this fantastic company today ReCaptcha via http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/technology


I think it's a fantastic project and will definitely be supporting this in the future.



A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms.

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.








Update: like all good things....google has acquired them - they are still offering this service with more info at - https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/


If you are looking for alternative providers/solutions for recpatcha then check out this helpful article at - https://wiht.co/captcha-options
 

Cheers,
Dean

No comments:

Post a Comment