CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is widely used in major mainstream websites as a security mechanism to classify human and computer. In recent years, the design and breaking technology of CAPTCHA have become an important research issue in order to verify security and reliability, which involves image processing, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, computer vision and etc. This paper outlines some typical CAPTCHAs and presents an approach to recognize the text-based CAPTCHAs based on image processing and support vector machine algorithms. By testing the simple test-based CAPTCHAs, the experimental results show that the approach has an efficient recognition.