Re: Parsing images

At 12:11 PM -0400 5/11/06, Robert Cummings wrote:

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 11:47, tedd wrote:

At 9:28 AM +0300 5/11/06, Dotan Cohen wrote:

Hey all, it is possible to parse capcha's in php? I'm not asking how to do it, nor have I any need, it's just something that I was discussing with a friend. My stand was that ImageMagik could crack them. She says no way. What are your opinions? Thanks. Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com

Of course -- it's trivial.

All images can be broken down into signals and analyzed as such. If you have any coherent data, it will show up. If it has to conform to glyphs, it most certainly can be identified. You want something that's not trivial, take a look at medical imaging and analysis thereof.

Extracting passcodes from captcha text is not what I'd call trivial. It's one thing to pull trends out of an image, it's quite another to know that a curvy line is the morphed vertical base of the capital letter T. Similarly knowing that the intensity of red in an area is related to the existence of some radioacive tracer agent, isn't quite the same as knowing that the curvy letter T might be red, yellow, green, yellow blended to green,. etc etc. The human eye and brain are amazing accomplishments, and while someday we may match their ability in code, I don't think it's this year.

We've been doing edge detection, noise suppression, data analysis, and OCR for over 30 years. While it may not be obvious, it's still trivial in the overall scheme of things. The bleeding edge is far beyond this technology. tedd -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://sperling.com