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reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts

Posted by timothy on from the strange-confluence dept.

sciencehabit writes "Computer scientists have developed a program, called reCAPTCHA, which is being used in lieu of CAPTCHA by several sites, to help digitize old books and newspapers. The reCAPTCHA takes entries from old and faded texts that optical scanners and digital-text readers have trouble with. So every time you solve that string of crooked letters, you may actually be helping historians digitally reconstruct a page from the 1908 New York Times." The Science Now story links to the longer and more informative article at Ars Technica. (We last mentioned this program last year — and now it's good to get some sense of how well it's working.)

3 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Cool possible uses by Irish_Samurai · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Man, I would love to see the results if this technique was used for an ontological purpose.

    Please type in the word from the choices below that most closely relates to this word: OLD

    HISTORIC
    LIFESPAN

    Interesting shit indeed.

  2. Re:Validate your data, guys! by PPH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since they use entries from several users to validate correct translations for OCR'ed text, this probably won't cause them major problems. OTOH, I wonder if they can track the accuracy of each user's inputs and, if it becomes evident that a user is either incompetent or attempting to screw with the system, take appropriate measures.

    When someone's karma starts dropping into the negative range, they should let us know how well this worked out. If anyone can see their posts, that is.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  3. Recaptcha doesn't recapture context by Mumei+no+koshinuke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When solving these I sometimes find that there's more than one possibility for an illegible word, yet I can't tell which it is without knowing the context.
    For example, in some fonts "cost" and "cast" might be indistinguishable in the image shown. But given the context of the sentence it's trivial for a human to tell the difference.
    Suppose that they found these words on which people disagreed and had another captcha system which showed the full sentence. I'd guess they could improve their accuracy significantly in this case. Since they could prescreen for ambiguous words using the current captcha system, even if fewer people were willing to solve the "large" captcha, they would still get all the solutions they needed.