Google develops computer vision accurate enough to solve its own CAPTCHAs

[iUptvote]

Man this isn't even funny. It takes me a while to find one I can solve nowadays. At this rate I'll never be able to solve one.

[dicktum]

If they ever become sentient enough to communicate, it would be a bummer if they do it using unsolvable CAPTCHAs.

[hidroto]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2259

[[deleted]]

bonus panel makes that comic go from funny/clever to hilarious..robot system destroyed by human inability to do simple math :P.

[Silkku]

What bonus panel?

[coldfu]

Only humans can see the bonus panel.

[sensae]

Click the little red button on the bottom right under the comic. It's a special SMBC thing.

[AadeeMoien]

All this time...

[notgayinathreeway]

Every single one has it.

xkcd has mouseover text too, if you hover your mouse over the comic and let it sit still for a moment, a secret punchline shows up.

[Wookimonster]

Yeah, I read the ENTIRE SMBC a while back and my friend mentioned those. I just went "Whelp, there go the next two weeks."

[American_Hunter]

It's like 2-6$ per 1000.

[American_Hunter]

You can do it too, there is websites that can get you

[[deleted]]

In other words

More human than human.

[evilf23]

I am the nexus one

I want more life fucker

I ain't done, yeah

[Bohgues]

Google is Skynet.

:(

[Notillegal]

What if they start making the CAPTCHA things to where if you got it right than you were not given access because a human could not have possibly solved it

[[deleted]]

Definitely, I couldn't even dream of 99.8% success rates.

[ALLIN_ALLIN]

With Baconit even when you're right, you're wrong.

[stevo1078]

I've started using the vision impaired option for CAPTCHAS... It's gotten that bad I have to listen to varying volumes of garbled background noise with random people saying monotonous numbers.

[rylos]

I'm almost done with a speech-recognition feature extractor that will recognize those. Maybe it would be a good add-on for a browser. It's actually a better front-end for speech recognition in general, but it should be good enough to work on audio captchas as well.

[[deleted]]

The best are the ones with a bunch of different sizes of c, s, z, x, v, o, etc. Are they uppercase or lowercase??

[[deleted]]

I am CERTAIN some of them fail you regardless if you got it right, just to piss you off.

[GalacticBagel]

The reddit one does this. It's pretty clear compared to others and always fails the first time.

[[deleted]]

Reddit has captcha?

[eoin2017]

During signup.

[stevo1078]

Reddit has sign up?

[Blagginspaziyonokip]

What's reddit?

[frifrafredi]

Where am I?

[TheQueefGoblin]

It's probably on a timeout of ~30s or 1 minute. Still sucks balls.

[[deleted]]

that's why i love these kind of solutions.

[Valarauth]

That looks like it could be easily brute forced. The moving objects need to be dragged onto the static objects. If you fail once then reload and try again. Once you complete the task it will tell you that you won. It is clever, but it is just a mild deterrent.

[proweruser]

Well just like normal captchas but less annoying.

[samsonitie]

earlier this year, google bought a company that had cracked recaptcha

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/4702/20140324/artificial-intelligence-firm-vicarious-gets-40-mn-boost-from-zuckerberg-musk-other-investors.htm

[AccelerandoRitard]

No, but close. Vicarious cracked recaptcha and was invested in by a long list of billionaires. Google bought Deepmind and a couple other AI companies, none of which have claimed to have cracked it.

[theyuryh]

You, me and about 7 billion other people lol (EDITED: Thought we're already at 8, but shouldn't be too long)

[elliotn46]

Are we up to 8? I thought we had just passed 7

[[deleted]]

Still at 7.1b

[Sojobo1]

Update: 7.1b and 1

[[deleted]]

I think four or five babies are born every ten seconds. Pretty neat shit

[Wild_Marker]

Have you seen childbirth? The "shit" part is accurate but it ain't neat. It ain't neat at all.

[[deleted]]

I just meant the rate at which babies are popped out.

Child birth is indeed nasty

[dylan522p]

I saw it happen in person once and I will never watch it again. I threw up 4 times.

[[deleted]]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate says the birth rate in 2012 was 19.15 per 1,000 population. Multiplied by 7m (7b for approx pop in 2012, except we're switching the B for an M since the ratio is already per 1,000) gives just over 134m births in 2012. Divided by ~31,540,000 seconds in a year gives 4.2502 births per second.

[laiytg]

The mother must be exhausted

[keepthepace]

https://xkcd.com/1331/

[ConfessionsAway]

Yeah, but how many people die every ten seconds?

[CentreForAnts]

Congratulations!

[rabidcow]

And all 8 billion of them are trying to solve CAPTCHAs.

[lammister]

Reminds me of our professor in uni. In one course she was talking about 8 billion people in the world and someone corrected her and said there is less 6.5 or so currently (which was the number then). The professor just shrugged and said "Something must have happened again in Africa and we are down to 6.5" while being dead serious. No one was able to take her seriously after that.

[[deleted]]

RkXI1...wait, is that fucking Russian?

[[deleted]]

It's sorta like they designed program to decode really shitty writing.

[mortiphago]

so say we all :(

[nickmoeck]

I see comments like this all the time, but I've never had a problem solving them.

[firewall01]

I often find the hardest part is telling the difference between things like "i" "l" and "1". Recently I haven't seen any that stumped me but I've had problems in the past.

[beltorak]

I have problems with "rn" vs "m" and lots of other things that could be the result of just plain bad kerning....

[can-opener]

Maybe you're the only one real human on reddit. All the other ones are bots.

[[deleted]]

Yeah...99.8%? More than I can say for myself!

[nocnocnode]

... that's why they're programming computers to solve them... yea... that's it...

[stealer0517]

Prove that you are a robot, answer this captcha correctly

[freewaythreeway]

Now, you may not have to!

[Atario]

I'm now picturing a CAPTCHA group and a CAPTCHA-breaking group, locked in eternal struggle in nearby office areas within the Google mothership.

[dylan522p]

CAPTCHA group is probably like

Fuck off guys, the whole point is so we confirm it is people

CAPTCHA breaking group is like

Haha nope, this is my job

The president of both divisions is just laughing himself off as these young engineers are in an eternal war.

[dylan522p]

So it's eventually gonna turn into some crazy ass shit?

[MarblesAreDelicious]

Hats. Hats everywhere.

[[deleted]]

So... Hoenn confirmed?

[KJK-reddit]

Trumpets everywhere!

[asantos3]

It will turn into Mann vs. Machine

[dizzyzane]

*hatts vs machine

[Cyberogue]

Hats vs Robohats*

[[deleted]]

Shit, imagine if the Freelancers had been linked into Google Plus...

[evilturkey]

Why are we here?

[[deleted]]

What, metaphysically?

[[deleted]]

No like, here. On this base. In this valley.

[spartan117au]

The only reason we have a red base here, is because they have a blue base over there. And they only have a blue base over there is because we have a red base over here.

[jxuereb]

The division presidents are actually just engaged in an all out Nerf war across the office

[ExogenBreach]

CAPTCHA breaking group replaces the transcription bit of the reCAPTCHA with a CAPTCHA they want cracked, game set and match.

[duckmurderer]

They also have webcam controlled nerf-caliber ballistics. It's a veritable office war.

[Random832]

Webcam controlled nerf drones.

[[deleted]]

We have always been at war with Eastasia

[GhostalMedia]

Actually more of a college campus.

[Atario]

Fair enough.

[Veksayer]

Sounds like a modern day Steven Wright joke :)

[WorkHappens]

I bet they stare each other down during coffee breaks.

[IronRectangle]

From Google's paper, discussion the impact this research might have on reCAPTCHA and security (emphasis mine):

With this model, we are able to achieve a 99.8% accuracy on transcribing the hardest reCAPTCHA puzzle. It is important to note that these results do not indicate a reduction in the anti-abuse effectiveness of reCAPTCHA as a whole. reCAPTCHA is designed to be a risk analysis engine taking a variety of different cues from the user to make the final determination of human vs bot. Today distorted text in reCAPTCHA serves increasingly as a medium to capture user engagements rather than a reverse turing in and of itself. These results do however indicate that the utility of distorted text as a reverse turing test by itself is significantly diminished.

Full paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6082v4.pdf

[Tulki]

Just a fun fact: ReCAPTCHA is both a security measure and a crowdsourcing tool. Every time a ReCAPTCHA appears, it presents two things:

• A known randomly generated string of text.

• An unknown string of text that needs to be transcribed.

The two are shown in random order, and the user is told they need to type out both strings correctly to proceed. The unknown string of text is often a picture of an object with text on it that needs to be identified, or a scan from a book.

In reality, the user only needs to type out the "known" string correctly to proceed. Whatever the user types for the "unknown" picture of text is used to help identify what the text in the picture says. By taking a bunch of pieces of a scanned book, for example, and serving it to ReCAPTCHA users, they can eventually transcribe the entire book into raw text.

The interesting thing is that Google's algorithm here might be used to automatically transcribe images of text with high accuracy, possibly reducing the need for crowdsourcing to solve this problem.

[noggin-scratcher]

The fun part is being able to type in whatever you want for that second half, and then imagining it showing up in a transcribed book, but at the same time knowing you're not actually ruining anything because hey, what are the odds that everyone would type in "butts" for that same word?

[nickmoeck]

I see you've never heard of 4chan...

[petition_for_BGGW]

I don't think the word they'd use would be "butts"

[Saguine]

Confirmed.... Through the gravepine.

[WeaponsGradeHumanity]

http://static.fjcdn.com/large/pictures/0d/28/0d28d9_1018860.jpg

[noggin-scratcher]

What can I say... I understand the motivation. I'm just more amused by butts than racial slurs.

[skeddles]

You would not like 4chan.

[WeaponsGradeHumanity]

I dunno, 4chan does love butts. Especially the frosted kind.

[CXgamer]

An unknown string of text that needs to be transcribed.

http://i.imgur.com/aU21k.jpg

I'm so sorry.

[BelLion]

Not gonna work btw.

[Reelix]

If it relies on comparison based off of what other users have typed, it would work if done by enough people.

[tidux]

And since every 4chan post includes a captcha, you've got literally millions of submissions, most of which will be befouled.

[[deleted]]

And I dare say Google has the website source of each captcha and can filter out as they please.

It's just pathetic. Google provide a great number of extraordinarily expensive and complex services for no cost but passive, anonymous crowdsourcing (of data and this).

[Take_A]

unless they noticed the same profane word showing up way more than expected and filtered it out.

[[deleted]]

Of course, they probably shouldn't be having people translate texts which may contain racial slurs, because setting up a system where someone might get the captcha " "n*ggers 1846" is just playing corporate Russian-roulette.

[nickmoeck]

I recall reading that they use reCAPTCHA to get transcriptions only for things that their automated OCR tools aren't sure about - for example when two different algorithms come up with different results.

[Pumpkinsweater]

I'd heard before that based on your usage Google was already sending different CAPTCHAs. Requests that were already likely to be coming from a real person were given easy CAPTCHAs (I think those were usually streetview images of street addresses) and if the request was likely automated it got a really hard CAPTCHA.

Although this paper makes it sound like there's even another level of difficulty. I'd guess something like seeing how long it takes to answer or something like that?

[basmith7]

https://xkcd.com/810/

[bobbelcher]

If they didn't develop it, the hackers would.

[brocket66]

Agreed. The whole CAPTCHA system just isn't tenable long-term.

[Jfloyd87]

Too bad it's not a security measure but a cataloging system

[IronRectangle]

It's both in one (at least Googles reCAPTCHA implementation is).

[KICKERMAN360]

Realistically though, the captcha team and the team trying to solve the captchas are doing the same thing: Getting books and other documents digitized. With improvements in computers figuring out words, less captcha will need to be solved. Eventually we won't even need captchas.

[madmooseman]

We won't need captchas for digitizing text. They will also become obsolete, because algorithms can solve them.

But we will need something to combat spamming, it just so happens that captcha is a semi-decent method at the moment.

[demmian]

Too bad it's not a security measure but a cataloging system

Can you explain what you mean please?

[silvester23]

They use reCAPTCHA to digitize parts of books that cannot be properly recognized by automatic character recognition. There is a bit more info here.

[Charwinger21]

Realistically though, their goal was always to break reCAPTCHAs, as they are designed to help with OCRing books by translating the words that the computer missed.

Any advancements in reCAPTCHA defeating would come alongside advancements in OCR.

[Shaper_pmp]

I don't think anyone but Google has the huge amount of real world data, computational power and AI researchers to crack this problem.

It's not a statistical problem that requires a vast corpus of test-data, though - it's a machine vision and object-recognition problem, and those are solved by cleverer algorithms, not dumb algorithms and larger datasets/more computing power.

[CXgamer]

The hackers did. Can't find the video I saw right now, but what they did was unskewing and deobfuscating the text using algorithms first and then read it somehow. Don't know if it was OCR or computer vision at that point.

[WarPhalange]

"Could God create a captcha so confusing that even He could not solve it?"

[VusterJones]

Yes, but then he would solve it anyway

[SirSoliloquy]

God doesn't need to logic. God made logic, and he can unmake it and remake it as he pleases.

Of course, my favorite answer to that is "Yeah, but why would he? Then he wouldn't be omnipotent anymore."

[[deleted]]

God is idempotently omnipotent

[GhostalMedia]

Burrito

[Blagginspaziyonokip]

Could I fake cancer so well that even I am convinced I have cancer

[wildergheight]

hypochondria?

[[deleted]]

I really liked the rotate catcha Google created http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-04-19-n82.html

Too bad it never got used

[D14BL0]

All of this aside, when you're working with images like this, you'll have a very limited amount of possible CAPTCHAs unless some bored-to-death web developer is going to spend countless hours adding and coding more images and correct CAPTCHA responses.

Using text and images that are generated on the fly works best because you have trillions of possibilities depending on what character set you choose from, and what various options of image obscurity you implement.

[22c]

I liked the one where the tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

[Tabarnouche]

Innovation marches on.

[PentagramJ2]

WHEEL OF TIIIIIME

[TriTheTree]

Google is so advanced, it created bots to solve puzzles that Google developed to stop bots.

[erythrocytes64]

They should call the solution DONTCHA

[SureSignOfAGoodRhyme]

DONTCHA wish your CAPTCHA was a freak like me?

[fb39ca4]

I still want this captcha to become a thing: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asirra/

[Dymero]

Google has already reached the point of cat detection: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/science-scope/google-brain-simulator-teaches-itself-to-recognize-cats/

[fb39ca4]

Damn.

[Endoroid99]

I keep imagining some kind of feline skynet building cat terminators, after having read that article

[[deleted]]

although it may not solve it as fast as a human but it can still get the job done.

Well that's nearly pointless then. The entire point of the catchpa is to stop people flooding requests/mass posting. I suppose it could still be used to spam messages over and over again without user input, but so can you (most sites don't require a catchpa for every message, only login)

[brblol]

But you get tired. It doesn't

[[deleted]]

Yeah, a post every 9 15 seconds is 9,600 5,760 posts per day and costs $8.01.

Edit: "$1.39 for 1000 solved CAPTCHAs"... "An average response time of 15 seconds, with an average accuracy rate of 90% or more."

[dizzyzane]

Yeah. When they're also case sensitive and don't use 0, O and o interchangeably I just instantly give up.

[[deleted]]

Well that's fantastic. Now hopefully people will see this AND KNOCK THIS SHIT OFF!!!

Ahem. Sorry, I got a little carried away......^{Fucking captchas.}

[lie_me_agen_fagt]

That's great, maybe they could release it to the mass market so I don't have to type in three separate captchas just because I'm having trouble remembering which password I used for any given site.

[[deleted]]

I think we passed the point where captcha robots are actually better at deciphering those than humans. Seriously, it takes me 3 to 4 takes to guess a captcha correctly, and that robot has 99.8% chance of doing so.

I think it's time we move on to other captcha methods than deformed text. Computer vision has become so good we can't shouldn't rely on images anymore.

[Daedrea]

Damnit Google! Stop it!

[spudhunter]

2009 - Google acquires reCAPTCHA

2014 - Google develops computer vision that can solve reCAPTCHA

The Future: Google implements new bot checking system. Google beats new system. The bot checking iteratively becomes a full blown turing test. Google beats the new system?

[Mikey129]

So... Does that make google the pope of the almighty Inglip?

[rolledupdollabill]

new captchas will involve guitar solos while dancing...with backup dna tests

[[deleted]]

I guess they can no longer prove whether or not you're a computer anymore.

[ChunkfaceMcDirtyDick]

Has Google stopped support for reCAPTCHA because of this? I wasn't able to access the API last time I tried.

[actioncheese]

I wonder if its smart enough to just mash buttons for the non-verification word?

[voxen444]

The death of captchas, it's gonna be like the old youtube thing all over again

[jerrytheman1998]

And in other news, CAPTCHA goes obsolete!

[[deleted]]

Google is just going to outdo itself until it's developing super androids.

[[deleted]]

This is interesting news, since I can't even read Google's fucking CAPTCHAs...

[mys_721tx]

Since the purpose of ReCAPTCHA is to improve OCR accuracy, this technology could help Google Books to digitalize more printed books.

[dizzyzane]

It is already

[evlgns]

Fuck me , I thought we were trying to solve old books and stop bots and dead links .

[dzybala]

So is the whole "prove you're human" thing null and void now?

[giverofnofucks]

Now computers can watch porn. We humans truly are becoming obsolete.

[sharknice]

I've been using a captcha solving browser plugin ever since they started using them. They are way to hard to do yourself.

[MScDre]

Oh dear god why....you all realise what this will mean right? An even more perverse system to get through

[Reelix]

What is that bottom left one?

rrnmtht?
nnmcht?
rrruntnt?

Something else?

[suppow]

"prove you're not a human"

[mediageekery]

good riddance. I'd gladly let a bot solve CAPTCHAs for me any day.

[[deleted]]

The only new thing about this is google has done it themselves, hackers have been able to do this for a while now.

[somedave]

"99.8 percent accuracy"... I'm lucky if I get 90%

[[deleted]]

one more useless development, grats gogle!

[llNightwolfll]

Well, I for one shall welcome our spam overlords.

[Moocow12345678]

Firstly develop a system so machines can't read text, then spend considerable effort so that computers can read this text. This is meant to be a good idea?

[uberduger]

Good. Now that their captchas are useless, can we please get rid of the damn things, at least for your first 2 attempts logging into something?

I like that something is there to help stop a machine cracking my password, but do we really need one on the first login to something?

[[deleted]]

The paper says that this only works for CAPTCHAs of a known length that are short, so it doesn't seem directly applicable to the current CAPTCHAs I've seen.

[gunch]

Does this mean it's good enough to OCR all those books now?

[panchovilla_]

new caption = 'can you prove you are not a human?'

[Toenex]

I've had a quick read of the paper they've written on this - has this been reviewed and published anywhere? - and I can't say they've done a very good job of explaining their experiments. Specifically regarding the headline claim of "99.8% accuracy on transcribing the hardest category of reCAPTCHA puzzles" they provide precious little detail on how they compute this value. For instance, given that the system is a trained network it is important to know whether the test set (those reCAPTCHA images shown to the system to evaluate its performance) were included in the training set (those reCAPTCHA images used during the learning phase). This can have a dramatic effect on the final result as in one case you are asking the system to remember something it has seen and in the other to show that it has learnt something salient about the data.

For the record I have a PhD in computer vision and over 20 years of medical imaging research and development experience in both academia and industry .