A Sigma-Lognormal Model for Handwritten Text CAPTCHA Generation

Popular CAPTCHA systems consist of garbled printed text character images with significant distortions and noise. It is believed that humans have little difficulty in deciphering the text, whereas automated systems are foiled by the added noise and distortion. However, in recent years, several text based CAPTCHAs have been reported as broken, that is, automated systems can identify the text in the displayed image with a reasonable amount of success. An extension to the text based CAPTCHA concept is to utilize unconstrained handwritten text, which is still considered to be a challenging problem for automated systems. In this work, we present a automated handwritten CAPTCHA generation system by adding distortions to the Sigma-Lognormal representation of a handwritten word sample. In addition, several noise models are also considered. We perform experiments on the UNIPEN dataset and demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.