Please help support CiteULike by taking part in our marketing survey.
CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures Export

Science (14 August 2008), 1160379.

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are widespread security measures in the World Wide Web that prevent automated programs from abusing online services. They do so by asking humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet perform, such as deciphering distorted characters. Our research explored whether such human effort can be channeled into a useful purpose: helping to digitize old printed material by asking users to decipher scanned words from books that computerized optical character recognition (OCR) failed to recognize. We showed that this method can transcribe text with word accuracy over 99%, matching the guarantee of professional human transcribers. Our apparatus is deployed in over 40,000 Web sites and has transcribed over 440 million words. 10.1126/science.1160379


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.