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Google are using reCaptcha to read door numbers from their Street View data (imgur.com)
8 points by sksksk on July 28, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


For those who don't know how reCAPTCHA works, they present two words to the user. One "known" word and one "unknown" word. When you enter both, Google compares your entry to the known word for CAPTCHA validation and stores your response to the unknown word for OCR.

You can often tell which word is the unknown one, because it is often more skewed and often not a word at all. Seeing how 128 is pretty bold, straight on, and with a whiter background, I am guessing at a Google OCR algorithm could solve it - meaning that it would be the known word, not the one they are trying to find out (sayOAD).


If OCR can read it then it's not a good captcha, is it?


There are 2 words.




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