Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there a way to use Image::Magick to read image code strings? On some forms they have a few numbers or letters on an image to type in to verify yourself. If Image::Magick can't do it, is there a Perlish way to do it or a way to make Perl run whatever program can do it?

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Re: ImageMagick image reading
by marto (Cardinal) on Jun 14, 2006 at 20:38 UTC
    Greetings Anonymous Monk,

    I believe you are refering to a CAPTCHA. The previous wiki links to various Perl resources, and there are a few hits on Cpan you should take a look at. The entire point of this kind of security image is to make it hard for programs to 'read' the text content of the image.

    Hope this helps.

    Martin
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Re: ImageMagick image reading
by leocharre (Priest) on Jun 15, 2006 at 16:00 UTC

    "...Thayananthan, Stenger, Torr, and Cipolla of the Cambridge vision group have written a program that can achieve 93% correct recognition rate against ez-gimpy..." ..

    What does that mean for you? It means put your energy towards something more useful. You're wasting your time.

    It can be coded. But if *you* ask such a general over arching question about it, *you* do not have what it takes. And probably not what it takes to solve any such problem. First you start, you go as far as you can.. then you ask questions. If you are looking for a tool to simply do that, forget it. It won't appear for you.

    I don't suppose this is a scholarly endeavour. But if it were..
    You'd have to know a great deal about programming (thinking, and patience, learning ) - and have a bargain of time in your hands. It would take you a month to get 20% accuracy- If ever you made something that works well- you would likely become enlightened in the learning process. And you would no longer have a use for such a thing.
    Kind of like what happened to Oppenheimer- or R MacNamara, in the end- they look over their shoulder and cry.

    People that made captchas have anticipated your intentions. Do you really want to try to kiss your date when you already asked her and she said no?

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Re: ImageMagick image reading
by xorl (Deacon) on Jun 15, 2006 at 18:34 UTC
    I'd only use perl to grab the image and pass it to some kind of character recognition program. I wouldn't try to write something as difficult as a character recognition program. Considering that half the time, I can't figure out these captchas on most forums now, it is probably a good thing I don't try to write such a program.
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