What is Artificial Intelligence?

captcha technology is continually evolving to outstmart robot hackers

"Humans have a very special skill that computer bots have not yet been able to master," says Prof. Cohen-Or leader of a research project of the Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences.

CAPTCHAs were first developed to prevent bots from adding URLs to the search engine. The idea was contextualized in 1997 by Andrei Broder, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Mark Lillibridge, who used images resistant to OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

CAPTCHAs are specifically designed as tasks that only humans can perform. Several researchers attempted to create a reliable 'captcha' application. A few of these applications like computer character recognition, voice or sound and image recognition are still widely used today.

Adding to the list is another 'emergence technology' which is being developed at Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences to better outsmart computer bots.

The team demonstrated how a video captcha code may be harder to outsmart. Using a technology called an 'emergence image', an object is only recognizable when it's moving, and a person can identify this image in a matter of seconds.

In a recent research paper, Dr. Cohen-Or, co-authored by colleagues in Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and India, described a "synthesis technique" that involves generating images of 3-D objects, like a running man or a flying airplane that will enable security developers to generate an infinite number of moving "emergence" images that will be virtually impossible for any computer algorithm to decode.

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