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.)

Comments

Not new

[JazzyMusicMan]

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 =) )

Re:Not new

[grahamd0]

Facebook uses reCAPTCHA. I guess you can make something useful out of the millions of useless teenagers wasting their time on Facebook.

That's not fair.

Plenty of useless adults waste their time on Facebook.

Cool possible uses

[Irish_Samurai]

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.

Re:Cool possible uses

[burgundysizzle]

Or perhaps SLASHDOT-READER:

OVERWEIGHT

GEEK

SPENDS-TO-MUCH-TIME-USING-COMPUTERS

ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE

I fit into the category ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE. The only generalisation that is missing about slashdotters is the one about girlfriends.

DMCA Violation

[Nymz]

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.

Prior art

[armanox]

I think that erosion on stone tablets predates fading by quite a bit....

Re:AC for the plain old CAPTCHA

[grahamd0]

Let me introduce you to my friend, the question mark.

Re:One Problem

[RedWizzard]

One FUNDAMENTAL problem with this

... is that you didn't RTFA.

Recaptcha doesn't recapture context

[Mumei no koshinuke]

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.

Re:Image Captchas

[Martz]

Just use an alt tag.

Use to hide your own email addy

[RJFerret]

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