Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/

by wglb • 14 years ago

99 34 14 years ago

pbreit• 14 years ago

I'm really not a fan of captchas in general and Recaptcha in particular. Captchas are user hostile enough, benefiting the service provider at the user's expense. Recaptcha is worse because it is even more of a drag on the user and now also benefits Google.

I run across a lot of captchas where I would be very surprised if the site owner actually had a problem being addressed by the captcha.

schiffern3• 14 years ago

> Recaptcha is worse because it... now also benefits Google.

I fail to see how this is a down-side. Maybe it's not an up-side, but is it actually a loss for anyone?

pittsburgh• 14 years ago

As a developer, I agree that captchas can be a drag on users, and I think we should put serious thought into whether or not their UX-cost is justified. Personally, I try to avoid using them on sites I build.

That said, as a user, it's hard to hate ReCaptcha after hearing Luis von Ahn talk about and defend his invention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8

It's a clever way to digitize books (and now street signs) while keeping out spambots, and when I combine that knowledge with my affinity for Luis von Ahn as a person I find myself less annoyed every time I have to prove I'm not a robot.

a3_nm• 14 years ago

> It's a clever way to digitize books (and now street signs)

It used to be a cool idea when it benefited everyone, because it was used to ditigize public domain books that everyone could retrieve. Now, it's only a clever way for Google to use your brain to do stuff for their own purposes.

quanticle• 14 years ago

You'd be surprised. With automated posting tools, the cost of probing many different sites and posting massive amounts of spam (in an effort to raise search engine rankings) is very low indeed. I've run several small forums, and without fail, eventually they'd be overrun with spam and I'd have to either 1) install authentication or 2) install a captcha.

I agree that captchas are user-hostile. But, when weighed against the alternative - a forum or comments section so filled with spam and nonsense as to be unusable - captchas are by far the lesser of two evils.

sukuriant3• 14 years ago

Wow. That's even easier to write a bot to circumvent...

ericlevine• 14 years ago

Are you suggesting that detecting text from these mediocre-at-best photos is easy or that it's easy to determine which of the two sides is the control photo?

sukuriant3• 14 years ago

I'm suggesting that it's easier to detect text from these "mediocre at best" photos. Classifying objects in a visual space often deal with low quality images. In fact, the algorithms have to deal with the objects they're trying to classify at many different resolutions. While captchas are generally hard to identify even for humans, because they're contorted and confusing, the numbers in these addresses are all standardized numbers in grainy environments.

I would even go as far to argue that if these become widely used, we're going to see algorithmic "solvers" for this captcha in a matter of weeks.

herge• 14 years ago

If Google is using those pictures as captchas, it is probably because they could not write an algorithm to decipher them.

If, in the worst case, this results in spammers creating even better pattern recognition algorithms than the current cutting edge, it is certainly worth all the effort.

anonymoushn• 14 years ago

User responses to the pictures are not checked for correctness. Every time you see a reCAPTCHA, you can just enter a garbage value for the word that is less distorted and the system will accept it.

smackfu• 14 years ago

Many of those in the examples at the bottom look like trivial work for OCR.

nkassis• 14 years ago

Could be to see how reliable the results are for the experiment or the OCR I guess. How well they agree.

peteretep• 14 years ago

Which is weird - the whole strength of RECAPTCHA comes the examples being ones that computers have specifically failed to solve...

ceol3• 14 years ago

From a privacy standpoint, what effect does this have on us? I kind of cringed at the thought of my house number being spread around the Internet for strangers to solve. Then I realized I don't really have a problem with people solving my address so much as I have a problem with Google having a database of photographs of everyone's house.

Are my concerns unfounded?

notatoad3• 14 years ago

In what way does tying the appearance of your house to its street number have anything to do with your privacy?

ceol3• 14 years ago

It's more so the photograph of my house than knowing my street number.

mquander• 14 years ago

If you even hinted at what your concerns actually are, then I guess people might be better at speculating about whether they are unfounded or not.

notatoad3• 14 years ago

I think everybody might be looking at this backwards. Google already has very precise gps-correlated maps and street view data, it doesn't seem like they would need our help to determine street addresses.

Recaptcha pairs a known with an unknown to verify, maybe the addresses are the known factor.

hbar• 14 years ago

Usually if I input an address into Google maps, it places a marker somewhere near the actual address. If I use street view it seems to point me in a random direction and usually not toward the address I wanted. I think this is aimed at that.

DavidChouinard• 14 years ago

Slightly related, but if you haven't yet seen Luis von Ahn's TED talk on reCAPTCHA, I recommend it highly: http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_c...

Permit• 14 years ago

I'm curious how they're able to identify what parts of images are house numbers. To me, that seems like it would be a harder problem than determining what numbers are present. But I have really little knowledge in this domain so I might be completely wrong.

majmun• 14 years ago

let me guess , there is another captcha that test users to find house numbers in a picture.

Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses

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