> > Object recognition is a completely unsolved computer vision problem.

It's funny you quoted that part. I can't tell you how many "next-gen" captchas I've broken trivially with the object recognition software our company has developed (http://demo.pittpatt.com). Granted, our software is useless against this type of Captcha, but many aren't.

Captchas have become a really interesting area of research for us because it's essentially the opposite problem that we are trying to solve. What's really curious about this is object recognition people seem keenly aware of the advancements in Captcha design and Captcha designers seem blissfully ignorant of the advances in object recognition.

I've seen so many proposed "next-gen" captchas that I could break before I finished reading their powerpoint slides.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/2007/images/time100landi... - misses Obama. (It's good software, was just funny to me.)

Yea, it does. I just re-ran that image on our newest models and it does find Obama in that image, but at low confidence. See above about how our website demos are out of date.

Gonna be adding newer, better, cooler ones soon.

Sweet, good work! Being able to get the top google results for "faces" might not mean much in reality, but those are some of the first things people will throw at the demo.

Just out of curiosity, do you guys have a facial recognition (not detection) demo available?

Not yet, but hopefully soon. We have a recognition SDK but not online demo. I am pushing hard to get our demos up to date. We have so much cool stuff that isn't online demo'd yet. Once other stuff cools down, we can turn more attention to the website demos.

If only there were some way to implement a captcha that could only be solved automatically by doing useful work--say, a few steps in a protein folding sequence, in a way that's easy to visualize.

"Imagine a beowulf cluster of spammers"

Either way, we win!