An Advance In Image Recognition Software
Roland Piquepaille alerts us to work by US and Israeli researchers who have developed software that can identify the subject of an image characterized using only 256 to 1024 bits of data. The researchers said this "could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do." As an example, they've picked up about 13 million images from the Web and stored them in a searchable database of just 600 MB, making it possible to search for similar pictures through millions of images in less than a second on a typical PC. The lead researcher, MIT's Antonio Torralba, will be presenting the research next month at a conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
Incorrect. First of all, in a CAPTCHA, you're trying to very rigorously inspect a single image. This advance seems to be more about taking quick glances at lots of images. Furthermore, in the article, they talk about recognizing flowers and cars. The fact is, computers already have no problem recognizing letters and numbers in images. We got that down a long time ago. The difficult things about reading a CAPTCHA image are removing distortion and splitting the whole image into the component characters. If you read the article, you'd see that this research has nothing to do with that.
Or rather... I'll believe it when it sees me!