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A CAPTCHA is a challenge designed to distinguish humans from computer programs (’bots’) on the internet. To be useful, a CAPTCHA must be easily solved by most humans, while being difficult to solve by computer programs. Many people have seen examples of CAPTCHAs when signing up for a free webservice. They are typically implemented as a string of distorted text that must be transcribed.

My MS thesis explored the viability of a Video CAPTCHA.  In my Video CAPTCHA, users must provide three tags that best describe a video. These tags are then matched against an automatically generated list of ground-truth tags. A good starting place to learn more is our SOUPS ‘09 paper. For a live demo, please click here.

Related Publications

• Kurt Alfred Kluever and Richard Zanibbi. Balancing Usability and Security in a Video CAPTCHA, In Proc. of the 5th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS ‘09), Mountain View, CA, July 2009.
• Kurt Alfred Kluever and Richard Zanibbi. Video CAPTCHAs: Usability vs. Security, In Proc. IEEE Western New York Image Processing Workshop (IEEE WNYIP ‘08), Rochester, NY, September 2008.
• Kurt Alfred Kluever. Evaluating the Usability and Security of a Video CAPTCHA. Master’s thesis, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, August 2008.

Related Talks

• July 17th, 2009 by Kurt Alfred Kluever at SOUPS ‘09 in Mountain View, CA, USA. [paper] [slides]
• May 2nd, 2009 by the DPRL crew at the 2009 Imagine RIT Festival in Rochester, NY, USA.
• January 28th, 2009 by Richard Zanibbi at the RIT Center for Imaging Science in Rochester, NY, USA. [video] [abstract] [bio]
• November 19th, 2008 by Richard Zanibbi at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England, UK. [slides]
• September 26th, 2008 by Kurt Alfred Kluever at WNYIP ‘08 in Rochester, NY, USA. [paper]
• August 28th, 2008 by Kurt Alfred Kluever at the RIT Department of Computer Science in Rochester, NY, USA. [slides] [abstract] [paper]
• May 3rd, 2008 by the Kurt Alfred Kluever and Richard Zanibbi at the 2008 Imagine RIT Festival in Rochester, NY, USA.
• May 2008 by the Kurt Alfred Kluever at Xerox Research Center Webster in Webster, NY, USA.

Related Links

• A few cool articles about our work from ZDNet.co.uk, Usable Security Blog, WinFuture.de, ChannelInsider.com, and PCMag.ZDNet.be.
• A LinkedIn discussion about Video CAPTCHAs.
• A Reddit submission and comment stream about Video CAPTCHAs.
• An interesting blog post about the future of CAPTCHAs.
• A similar idea where the user must figure out what music video is playing.