On the challenges that handwritten text images pose to computers and new practical applications

Most of the handwritten text challenges are usually either more severe or not encountered in machine-printed text. In contrast to the traditional role of handwriting recognition in various applications, we explore a different perspective inspired by these challenges and introduce new applications based on security systems and HIP. Human Interactive Proofs (HIP) emerged as a very active research area that has focused on defending online services against abusive attacks. The approach uses a set of security protocols based on automatic reverse Turing tests, which virtually all humans can pass but current computer programs don't. In our paper we explore the fact that some recognition tasks are significantly harder for machines than for humans and describe a HIP algorithm that exploits the gap in ability between humans and computers in reading handwritten text images. We also present several promising applications of HIP for Cyber security.