Google Releases Tesseract as Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "Google recently released Tesseract as open source. Originally developed at the HP Labs from 1985-1995, it has been touted as one of the most accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs available. Having sat on the shelf gathering dust for so many years, Google cleaned up some of the more outdated portions of the code and released it for general consumption. You can download Tesseract over at Sourceforge.
CAPTCHAs are specifically meant to break OCR... and if you RTFA, it say it does poorly with grayscale and color documents. Baisically its meant for reading typed text... like in a book.