A CAPTCHA variant has been tested that uses faces instead of words. A number of images including faces and non faces are randomised (rotated, placed in random locations in a canvas), with coloured shape distortion overlaid; the solver has to mark the locations of two matching faces.
The researchers found that this alternative was easy for humans to solve and user friendly, while also being secure against automated attack. It addresses the language/alphabet dependency challenges of text-based CAPTCHAs while remaining intuitive and simple for human users. In addition, the success of the proposed CAPTCHA also confirms that humans can match faces under severe distortion with high accuracy
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sir Finkus on Thursday April 17 2014, @07:53AM
That's actually pretty smart. Humans are very good at picking out facial features. The thing I worry about is that we will end up crowd sourcing facial recognition systems. I don't mind helping OCR books, but doing the same with people is a little creepy.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:12AM
Really? Isn't it common for "all Blacks/Asians/Whites/Etc to look alike" if you haven't as much experience in telling them apart? I have difficulty telling apart many of those female korean singers/actresses.
I think computers can easily be better at it. Especially since the matching faces are already provided in the challenge. Face detection is trivial so you can easily eliminate the nonfaces. For matching maybe do some texture mapping and stretch.
(Score: 2) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 17 2014, @11:48AM
I tend to agree, software like iPhoto and Picasa seem to do a pretty decent job recognising and matching faces. Not 100% of course, but the technology will only get better as time goes on.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Thursday April 17 2014, @08:00PM
Sounds like it's not just about matching faces, but matching *distorted* faces. Presumably that distortion is to throw off facial recognition software; hopefully they've put some thought into designing the distortion methods for that specific purpose.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:14PM
With the exception of blind people. And Autists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @01:22PM
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 17 2014, @08:34AM
ANYTHING has got to be better than those fucking PITA CAPTCHA's! The guy who invented those things should be strung up by the balls.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 17 2014, @11:52AM
Anything which requires optical accuity and perception both is a total non-starter, IMHO. Their system would think both my g/f and I are bots. Until I programmed a little script which would undo their trivial obfuscations, and matched the faces for me. Which I'm pretty sure I could do. The only thing they can claim is that it's not been broken *yet*. I give it a matter of days or weeks in the wild.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:13PM
I agree with all your points. I should have said that anything is better than the current breed of CAPTCHAS.
Deciphering my circular logic is probably still a lot easier than deciphering most CAPTCHA's though
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 17 2014, @03:07PM
Sure, that excludes foreigners, but most sites do have just one majority language. Most also have a specific domain of topics that are most relevant to their members, and therefore knowledge of that domain can be leveraged to make a generic cracker less capable.
Personally, I've found the best captcha policy to be:
1) Roll your own!
2) Make it trivial for humans to solve, even if it's also very easy for a bot specifically coded for your scheme
3) Ensure you can come up with a new different one at a whim
Honestly, it takes me 5 minutes to replace my CAPTCHAs, I keep them so simple. It would take at least a couple of hours to write a cracker. It's just not worth their effort.
Every time you use a library shared by one of the big sites, you're exactly as much a target as the big sites, as they get you for free once they've broken through, which they inevitably will.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:01AM
I find it incredibly hard to match the faces as shown in Fig.4.
Why is the 4th response incorrect?
Maybe I'm one of the 2.5% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by dublet on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:43AM
Or maybe you're actually a robot.
Nice try, Mr Roboto!
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 1) by harmless on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:53AM
Because the marked faces do not show the same guy.
It seems you would have problems identifying people if you were.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:50PM
Yep, I found the test difficult too.
I do have problems with recognising faces, though not as badly as some.
On the other hand I'm very good at recognising voices; if I see somebody I don't know terribly well I won't recognise them and assume that they're just some random person I don't know.
When they say 'Hello' to me I then realise who they are, and feel embarrassed that I didn't show any signs of recognition earlier.
It's annoying, and if these face-captcha's gain popularity, I'll need to setup a fake-porn site that gets hapless users to solve my captchas for me.... I've yet to see a captcha system that is immune to the 'mechanical turk' approach.
(Score: 1) by KritonK on Thursday April 17 2014, @01:20PM
I can't figure this out, either. I have to rotate my head to see each face, and the fact that the faces are distorted makes them essentially different, anyway.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Dr Ippy on Thursday April 17 2014, @02:43PM
Both my wife and I have fairly bad prosopagnasia. We've done some online tests and find them generally impossible. In real life we have problems recognising people we know when we meet them out-of-context, or if they're dressed in a different way, or if they've changed their hairstyle. (Actually this happened to me just this morning, when I met my neighbour unexpectedly.) It can be very embarrassing.
I've come to the conclusion that I don't see faces the way other people do; when I close my eyes and try to imagine a face, it's just a fuzzy blob with two eyes, a nose and a mouth. I think I must look for other cues when identifying someone.
This new type of CAPTCHA sounds a nightmare for people like us.
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(Score: 2) by elf on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:29AM
With the current Capatcha's I debate whether I am human or not because they are so hard. Thumbs up to anything that makes it easier
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:06AM
We are all robots. Some of us are mechanical in nature, others are biological in nature. The biological ones have had longer to evolve, so they have some properties which the mechanical siblings lack. Given time, we will see the rise of the machines.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:05PM
Yes, you're human. The problem with CAPTCHAS is not that they are hard, it's that they are often ambiguous, which is much worse. Telling apart a lowercase "s" from a capital "S" is pretty much impossible without a frame of reference, which is deliberately obfuscated by most CAPTCHAS. A capital "Q" can look like a capital "O" when there are random blotches distributed amongst the letters. The list goes on.
I doubt the solution proposed in TFA will free us from CAPTCHA hell, but I sure hope something does...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @02:50PM
I hate to break this to you but you're not human. You're an undergrad AI research project from some kid at Stanford running on AWS. Try not to get too upset by this or you might fault out.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:11AM
Instead we should take care of the actual problem: Micro$oft Windoze.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SpallsHurgenson on Thursday April 17 2014, @01:40PM
So, how would these work for people with poor or no sight?
Curently, text CAPTCHAs have an option to hear the letters spoken aloud. I'm not sure that would work so well for pictures of faces. A number of nations (UK, Australia, Italy, Brazil and others) have laws requiring web accessibility for people with disabilities (or at least to prevent them from being discriminated against) and these facial-recognition CAPTCHAs seem to run right into those.
I'm not sure it's all worth the bother anyway. Computers are becoming frighteningly good at facial recognition these days and I am not sure these CAPTCHAs will be more than a bump in the road for them. Or if not, they'll be defeated the same way text CAPTCHAs are, through re-directs to unsavory websites or by farming them out to people whose whole job is to bypass the damn things. Anyway, it all seems to be an attempt to cure the symptom (spammy posts) rather than the root cause (advertising fraudulant merchandise). Go after the companies that are paying to have the CAPTCHAs broken to advertise their wares; once the cost of spam goes up, the practice will decline.
(Score: 2) by juggs on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:16PM
CAPTHCAs are indeed quite horrific in accessibility terms for blind / sight impaired users.
Even the current text based ones that offer an audio alternative are nigh on impossible to solve. In order to defeat audio snarfing bots all the sound samples now have overwhelming "background" noise and then some barely perceptible mumbled phrase along the lines of "phhnurrg oon gwet" - at least that's what it sounds like in most cases.
I encourage everyone, every time they come across a CAPTCHA with audio alternative to don their headphones, close their eyes and try to solve it. Try it for a week and then try and extrapolate that frustration out to the rest of your life. It's really not amusing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @03:15PM
I'd rather have a captcha which asks 'what is the sum of the yellow numbers' where a box of numbers is shown and three are various shades of yellow.
How about: type the blue letters in reverse alphabetical order
Let's get really creative here.
Yes, solutions can be coded around captcha. Yes, there are workarounds. Let's make those *expensive*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @03:39PM
i'm colorblind, you insensitive clod ! ! !
(Score: 2) by carguy on Thursday April 17 2014, @04:43PM
The technology behind http://tineye.com/ [tineye.com] might make it pretty easy to crack this? Not associated with TinEye, just an occasional user.
(Score: 1) by FlatPepsi on Thursday April 17 2014, @05:41PM
As someone with mild Prosopagnosia, this ain't funny. I'd leave and never return to a web site that tried to implement this.
Might as well put up a color-blindness test to see if someone's human....