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reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts
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.)
Ticketmaster and other sites have already been doing this for a while. Go to ticketmaster and search for tickets, you'll see two words. One is known and the other is unknown. If you don't believe me, try to guess which one they know and misspell the other one on purpose (or don't, this is for historic posterity =) )
I can usually tell which of the two words is from a real old text. With high probability (>90%) I can correctly answer the real CAPTCHA and replace someone's OCR'd word with "penis".
I've only ever done this maybe ten or twenty times, but it could easily become an automatic part of using the system.
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.
The feature known as FADING was designed to protect copyright works from being pirated by becoming illegible before the work could fall into the public domain.
I think that erosion on stone tablets predates fading by quite a bit....
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I've found implementing a simple "please choose the name of the item seen bellow" eliminates a large amount of spam (all?) but has the problem of not being viable for blind people.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The following security test allows us to validate you are a human and not an automated script.
please type the following two words in the text box below
you moron
____________ _____________
There are multiple libraries for reCAPTCHA already published, all under the MIT License. Just see http://code.google.com/p/recaptcha/ for a list of them.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Let me introduce you to my friend, the question mark.
One FUNDAMENTAL problem with this
... is that you didn't RTFA.
I've seen one ReCAPTCHA string that was just a distorted entirely illegible blob of ink.
Just do what I did: click the "refresh" button to the right for a new word pair and enter that one.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
You can also use reCaptcha for your own email address, and be more willing to provide it "publicly" since they'd have to answer the reCaptcha to get to the mailto... reCaptcha mailhide