During PythonBrasil[6], we discussed about cracking captchas. I already worked on it to automate some tasks with a stupid captcha. A lot of internet voting systems and forms security are based on captcha.

It is really easy to clean the image with some Python tools.

def convert_image(image, threshold=30):
    for y in range(image.size[1]):
        for x in range(image.size[0]):
            color_original = image.getpixel((x, y))
            color_bw = (0, 0, 0) if max(color_original) < threshold else (255, 255, 255)
            image.putpixel((x, y), color_bw)

from PIL import Image
image = Image.open("captcha.jpg")
convert_image(image)
image.save("cleaned_captcha.tif", "TIFF")

Now, using pytesser (an OCR tool), I can just read the cleaned_captcha.tif file.

import pytesser
print image_file_to_string("cleaned_captcha.tif")

The result is LONMT. Wrong! It should be LONMH.

Just take a close look to the cleaned image. It has a black border, which cause some noise to pytesser. I removed this border and tried again. Now, the result is what I expected: LONMH.

Of course some captchas are really difficult to crack, but a lot of sites are based in useless captchas which any robot can solve. It is a crafted work, but it can be really easy in some cases. The two major problems I had to solve other cases of these captcha are:

• OCR misunderstood lower and upper case letters. This captcha has only upper case letters, so I can just replace i with L for example.
• OCR found two text lines in the image, so the output was in a wrong order. I solved this issue splitting the image in several images and reading one at a time.

As a final note but unrelated note, DO NOT USE CAPTCHAS.