A Novel Image Based CAPTCHA Using Jigsaw Puzzle

Most commonly used CAPTCHAs are text-based CAPTCHAs which relay on the distortion of texts in the background image. With the development of automated computer vision techniques, which have been designed to remove noise and segment the distorted strings to make characters readable for OCR, traditional text-based CAPTHCAs are not considered safe anymore for authentication. A novel image based CAPTCHA which involves in solving a jigsaw puzzle is presented in this paper. An image is divided into an n¡Án (n=3, 4 or 5, depends on security level) pieces to construct the jigsaw puzzle CAPTCHA. Only two of the pieces are misplaced from their original positions. Users are required to find the two pieces and swap them. Considering the previous works which are devoted to solving jigsaw puzzles using edge matching technique, the edges of all pieces are processed with glitch treatment to prevent the computer automatic solving. Experiments and security analysis proved that human users can complete the CAPTCHA verification quickly and accurately, but computers rarely can. It is a promising substitution to the current text-based CAPTCHA.