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Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

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Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#151

Post by reedlaw »

zwegner wrote: post #82
daenz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. I don't disagree, but although this specific problem can be automated, the arms race will continue as newer problems (requiring uniquely human intelligence) are presented. We can keep moving the bar until the singularity. For example, a captcha: "Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. To solve this,…

That runs into the scalability problem that I mentioned--someone (say, a Mechanical Turk user) can solve that problem once, and put it in a database. To avoid this, there needs to be a way to generate them cheaply, so you pretty much need a computer that can solve the problem in the first place. Basically, my point is that there's no such thing as "uniquely human intelligence". There's lots of problems that fall into…

It seems more likely that there's no such thing as "computer-identifiable human intelligence". Human intelligence is easily discerned by other humans.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#152

Post by Groxx »

zwegner wrote: post #82
daenz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. I don't disagree, but although this specific problem can be automated, the arms race will continue as newer problems (requiring uniquely human intelligence) are presented. We can keep moving the bar until the singularity. For example, a captcha: "Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. To solve this,…

That runs into the scalability problem that I mentioned--someone (say, a Mechanical Turk user) can solve that problem once, and put it in a database. To avoid this, there needs to be a way to generate them cheaply, so you pretty much need a computer that can solve the problem in the first place. Basically, my point is that there's no such thing as "uniquely human intelligence". There's lots of problems that fall into…

>To avoid this, there needs to be a way to generate them cheaply, so you pretty much need a computer that can solve the problem in the first place.

I don't see how that follows. Many captchas are just text with a confusing grid overlayed - that's incredibly trivial to produce, and producing one tells you next to nothing about how to solve them. Or if that's too easy, throw in some random distortion - still easy to produce, even harder to read.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#153

Post by [deleted] »

ashmud wrote: post #53
id wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been like this for a while now. AFAIK you have either - the actual captcha and a word from a book (Google Books) - the actual captcha and a house number from Street View (Google Maps) Only the actual captcha has to be typed in correctly.

Do people ever intentionally type in nonsense for the non-captcha part, out of spite, for instance? If you could persuade enough people to provide non-answers for the non-captcha part, would Google stop using it (the non-captcha part)? My guess is it's like spam. As long as it works a small fraction of the time, it will still exist.

[deleted]

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#155

Post by twistedpair »

zwegner wrote: post #45

This particular issue (AI performance on captchas) is really quite fascinating. It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. Google is claiming they have improved their system in some (understandably) unspecified way, but there's only so far this can go. Captchas need to detect whether someone is human, but it has to work for everyone, ideally, even those with disabilities. Any simple task a human ca…

If the recognition algorithms for numbers and faces in StreetView are so wonderful, why are there so many randomly blurred out bushes and bus stop signs? In a typical frame you can find a row of No Parking signs or parking meters and randomly one of them is blurred out, as if they thought it was a face. Machine learning has plenty of learning left to do.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#156

Post by im3w1l »

tim333 wrote: post #109
allochthon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. My sense is that IBM's Watson could tackle this particular question. Also interesting to note that the question introduces external considerations, such as whether or not there's someone dangerous near the house, bed, park, etc. A human respondent will have to ignore the matter of whether there's additional context and seco…

Of course the simple way around "Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. if you're a spammer is to choose randomly and make four times as many attempts. Which is why catchpas make you type six or more letters giving millions of combinations so you can't do it randomly. To get up to a similar resistance to random attempts with 'pick the unsafe environment' type que…

The key is that you are only presented with one captcha per request. But if you fail too many, you get labelled a spammer.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#157

Post by yaroslavvb »

josho wrote: post #10

Interestingly I activated a new gmail account today and during the signup process I experienced the obligatory captcha. It was in two parts, the first looked strikingly like a street view picture of a house number, while the second looked like a traditional captcha. I suspect that google has been using techniques like this to validate their computer vision conclusions. Which makes their 99% assertion even more intere…

The 99.8% assertion comes from synthetically generated CAPTCHAs. We don't need crowd-sourced ground-truth -- we know what the true answer is because we generated it.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#158

Post by path411 »

id wrote: post #77
akgerber wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did when Recaptcha came out and it was consistently obvious which was the unknown part. It's no longer so obvious, in my experience. I believe ReCaptcha presents the same unknown value to several users, and rejects outliers.

In my experience, it's still extremely obvious. It's always the word that's less readable (and doesn't look like it came from a book). And if you have numbers, it's even easier. Recently they added special captchas for untrusted users. If they think you might be a bot, you'll get much harder captchas. http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j...

Actually often it can be the opposite of what you would think. I don't think Google will distort the "unknown" word as much as the "known" word, making it where the "known" word can be harder to read for a human because it's passed through more filters.
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