An approach for segmentation of characters in CAPTCHA

In the area of image processing and Optical Character Recognition, Segmentation is one of the steps which plays an important role in dealing with offline and online text images. Character segmentation means breaking an image with word into a sequence of characters. A broad perspective of segmentation lies in segmenting the characters in CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). It is a test that authenticated users have to pass to gain access to their respective mail accounts. Malicious programs like bots, attack the accounts and are a threat to the data integrity, privacy and confidentiality. To avoid this, CAPTCHA was introduced. Segmentation of characters acts as the basis of analyzing the strength of CAPTCHA. Stronger the CAPTCHA, more difficult it is to break. The proposed work is about a CAPTCHA segmenter. It segments the CAPTCHA image with the help of a CAPTCHA Trainer. It is a user created set of pre-processing operations on images which can simply be re-used for segmenting the similar types of images, thus saving time. The operations that can be performed on any image are, gray scale conversion, dot removal, line removal, slant correction, color extraction, thinning.