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Google Street View tech can solve captchas with 99 percent efficiency

Google Street View tech can solve captchas with 99 percent efficiency

By Ershad Kaleebullah | Updated: 17 April 2014 14:38 IST

In an interesting development, Google announced in a scientific research paper that it has developed a new algorithm that is capable of solving captcha puzzles - the squiggly numbers entered by users to keep bots at bay. Google reports that it does so with an efficiency of over 99 percent.

Google says the algorithm is a part of the same technology that finds and reads street numbers using Street View cameras. It correlates those extremely difficult to detect numbers of existing addresses to pinpoint their exact location on Google Maps. In this case, however, it manages to get it right 90 percent of the time.

In a blog, Vinay Shet, product manager, reCaptcha, writes, "This shows that the act of typing in the answer to a distorted image should not be the only factor when it comes to determining a human versus a machine."

Shet highlights that it is not enough to rely on distorted text alone. As a result, Google's very own reCaptcha, which improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of captchas for humans to decipher, is working on significantly reducing dependence on text distortions, and instead perform advanced risk analysis.

In the wake of the report late last year which found out how a new artificial-intelligence software had managed to crack captcha, it is heartening to note that Google's Street View and reCaptcha teams are working together to make reCaptcha safer and more effective in logging results and Maps more precise.

Google recently updated its camera app, which is available in the Google Play store, with Lens Blur and other features. Also, the company announced that the publicly-available Glass eyewear was sold out in a day.

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