Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to main content

Synthetic handwritten CAPTCHAs

  • SUNY Buffalo

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

50 Scopus citations

Abstract

CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) are in common use today as a method for performing automated human verification online. The most popular type of CAPTCHA is the text recognition variety. However, many of the existing printed text CAPTCHAs have been broken by web-bots and are hence vulnerable to attack. We present an approach to use human-like handwriting for designing CAPTCHAs. A synthetic handwriting generation method is presented, where the generated textlines need to be as close as possible to human handwriting without being writer-specific. Such handwritten CAPTCHAs exploit the differential in handwriting reading proficiency between humans and machines. Test results show that when the generated textlines are further obfuscated with a set of deformations, machine recognition rates decrease considerably, compared to prior work, while human recognition rates remain the same.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3365-3373
Number of pages9
JournalPattern Recognition
Volume42
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2009

Keywords

  • CAPTCHA
  • HIP
  • Handwriting generation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Synthetic handwritten CAPTCHAs'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this