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You're reading from  Web Scraping with Python

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2015
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781782164364
Edition1st Edition
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Richard Penman
Richard Penman
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Richard Penman

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones.
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Solving complex CAPTCHAs


The CAPTCHA system tested so far was relatively straightforward to solve—the black font color meant the text could easily be distinguished from the background, and additionally, the text was level and did not need to be rotated for Tesseract to interpret it accurately. Often, you will find websites using simple custom CAPTCHA systems similar to this, and in these cases, an OCR solution is practical. However, if a website uses a more complex system, such as Google's reCAPTCHA, OCR will take a lot more effort and may not be practical. Here are some more complex CAPTCHA images from around the web:

In these examples, the text is placed at different angles and with different fonts and colors, so a lot more work needs to be done to clean the image before OCR is practical. They are also somewhat difficult for people to interpret, particularly for those with vision disabilities.

Using a CAPTCHA solving service

To solve these more complex images, we will make use of a CAPTCHA...

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Web Scraping with Python
Published in: Oct 2015Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781782164364

Author (1)

author image
Richard Penman

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones.
Read more about Richard Penman