AreCAPTCHA: Outsourcing Arabic Text Digitization to Native Speakers

Abstract

There has been a recent increasing demand to digitize Arabic books and documents, due to the fact that digital books do not lose quality over time, and can be easily sustained. Meanwhile, the number of Arabic-speaking Internet users is increasing. We propose AreCAPTCHA, a system that digitizes Arabic text by outsourcing it to native Arabic speakers, while offering protective measures to online web forms of Arabic websites. As users interact with AreCAPTCHA, we collect possible digitizations of words that were not recognized by OCR programs. We explain how the system works, the challenges we faced, and promising preliminary evaluation results.

Usability and Security of Arabic Text-based CAPTCHA Using Visual Cryptography

“…In addition, an approach entitled Arabic reCAPTCHA was discussed in some studies [14][15][16][17][18] and was developed for enhancing the digitization of Arabic manuscripts. In particular, Bakry et al [14] proposed the use of a reCAPTCHA (AreCAPTCHA) system that can be used to digitize Arabic text through native Arabic speakers.…”

“…In addition, an approach entitled Arabic reCAPTCHA was discussed in some studies [14][15][16][17][18] and was developed for enhancing the digitization of Arabic manuscripts. In particular, Bakry et al [14] proposed the use of a reCAPTCHA (AreCAPTCHA) system that can be used to digitize Arabic text through native Arabic speakers. In addition, Akila et al [15] proposed a new system called "Kalema" that is used for the digitization of scanned Arabic documents which can be converted to an audio format.…”