A CAPTCHA is an attempt to determine whether or not a user is human. It is in effect a reverse Turing test. CAPTCHA are designed to be difficult to recognize with a computer - the design and assessment of this assignment recognizes this difficulty.
The input to your program will be a black-and-white (monochrome) image in a simple format described below. Each image will contain either 1 or 4 digits. The output of your program should be the digits in the images
Instead this assignment uses portable bitmap format (PBM) for images. This is very simple ASCII format. The first line of each file will contain the characters "P1" identifying its format. The next line will contain 2 integers, the width and height of the images. The remainder of the lines in the file contain '1's and '0's specifying the pixel values of the image. Here is an example
Here is read_pbm.c which contains a function to read PBM files:
int read_pbm(char filename[], int height, int width, int pixels[height][width]);
It is strongly recommended you use read_pbm in your assignment rather than writing your own code.
crack_digit will be given one command line argument, an image filename.
The image will contain a single digit.
You program should print only a single line of output
This line of output should contain only the digit in the images.
For example:
./crack_digit digit/3_42.pbm 3 ./crack_digit digit/7_99.pbm 7 ./crack_digit digit/0_12.pbm 0A dataset of 1000 example digit images is available to help you develop your program.
The week 7 lab exercises take you through getting started on crack_digit.c.
crack_captcha will be given one command line argument, an image filename.
The image will contain 4 digits.
You program should print only a single line of output
This line of output should contain only the 4 digit in the images.
For example:
./crack_captcha captcha/4224.pbm 4224 ./crack_captcha captcha/9264.pbm 9264 ./crack_captcha captcha/0053.pbm 0053
A dataset of 1000 example captcha images is available to help you develop your program.
A dataset of 1000 example challenge captcha images is available to help you develop your program.
~cs1511/bin/captcha_test will automatically test your programs on a random subset
of a specified size of the supplied images:
~cs1511/bin/captcha_test --digit -n 10 crack_digit.c captcha.h other_C_files dcc crack_digit.c read_pbm.c -o crack_digit dcc crack_digit.c read_pbm.c --valgrind -o crack_digit-valgrind Running 10 tests Test digit/5_95.pbm passed ... ~cs1511/bin/captcha_test --captcha -n 20 crack_captcha.c captcha.h other_C_files dcc crack_captcha.c read_pbm.c --valgrind -o crack_captcha-valgrind Running 20 tests Test captcha/8119.pbm passed ... ~cs1511/bin/captcha_test --challenge -n 30 crack_captcha.c captcha.h other_C_files cc crack_captcha.c read_pbm.c -o crack_captcha dcc crack_captcha.c read_pbm.c --valgrind -o crack_captcha-valgrind Running 30 tests Test captcha_challenge/1936.pbm passed ...
Don't panic!
Don't expect digit or capture identification to be perfect, just identify as many images as possible correctly.
The week 7 lab exercises showed you how to use one attribute (horizontal balance) to separate some images giving you a program that recognizes 20% of digits. Check out the sample solutions when they are released immediately after the lab is due.
Think about other digit attributes you might calculate.
Here are some possibilities that aren't too hard to calculate:
| Tallness | height/width of the bounding box |
| Density | fraction of pixels in the bounding box that are black |
| Vertical balance | vertical equivalent of horizontal balance |
| Holes | number of holes in the image |
| Hole Fraction | area of white pixels in holes as fraction of bounding box |
There are more possibilities (and no right way to approach this).
If you invent attributes try to make them not depend on the size of the digit (scale invariant).
You may submit data files with the suffix .txt to be used by your program.
You may call functions from the standard C library and the maths library. You may not use functions from other libraries - in other words your program must compile with dcc without the -l flag being used to specify an extra library. If you don't understand this requirement don't worry - as long as the autotest scripts compile your program you are fine.
You program must take at most 30 seconds to process an image on a CSE computer when compiled with dcc.
You may assume digit images are 70 pixels high and 50 pixels wide.
You may assume captcha images are 72 pixels high and 200 pixels wide and challenge captcha are 70 pixels high and 200 pixels wide.
You can assume there is one and only one digit in the digit images and only 4 digits in the captcha images.
You can assume digits are roughly vertically oriented, in other words the right-way up more-or-less.
You can assume digits are a similar size to the digits in the supplied test images.
You can not assume that the digits do not touch the edge of the image.
Otherwise, make as few assumptions as you can about the images. In particular, you should try not to make assumptions about the exact pattern of pixels used for a particular digit.
The images used to test your programs will be different to the images you have been supplied.
You can however assume there will be no major difference in the depiction of digits. The test images give a reasonable indication of the type of variation in the depiction of digits that your program should handle.
Every time you work on the assignment and make some progress you should copy your work to your CSE account and submit it using the give command below.
It is fine if intermediate versions do not compile or otherwise fail submission tests.
Only the final submitted version of your assignment will be marked.
All these intermediate versions of your work will be placed in a git repo
and made available to you via a web interface at this URL, replace z5555555 with your zpass.
https://gitlab.cse.unsw.edu.au/z5555555/17s1-comp1511-ass1/commits/master
This will allow you to retrieve earlier versions of your code if needed.
You submit your work like this:
give cs1511 ass1 crack_digit.c crack_captcha.c captcha.h other filesYou may submit other .c or .h files.
When crack_digit.c and crack_captcha.c are compiled all other submitted C files will be compiled with them.
This will allow you define functions for use in both crack_digit.c and crack_captcha.c.
It is fine if these file contain functions used only by one of crack_digit.c or crack_captcha.c. Unused functions will not affect the compilation of the other program.
Only crack_digit.c and crack_captcha.c should contain main functions.
No other function name should be used twice.
You do not need to submit read_pbm.c. It will be automatically compiled with your programs. It is strongly recommended you use read_pbm.c unchanged. If you ignore this advice, do not create functions with the same names as functions in read_pbm.c
You must blog about all significant bugs in your assignment including what test found the bug, how the bug was tracked down and fixed, how long this took and any lessons learnt.
You may create one big blog post and edit each time, or multiple small blog posts for the assignment.
You may use code written with your lab partner for the functions in the week 7 lab. This code should include comments indicating the joint-authorship with your lab partner.
You may use code from the sample solutions for the week 7 lab. You should add comments indicating the source of this code.
You may use small amounts (< 10 lines) of general purpose code (not specific to the assignment) obtained from site such as Stack Overflow or other publically available resources. You should attribute clearly the source of this code in a comment with it.
You are not permitted to request help with the assignment apart from in the course forum or from course staff.
Do not provide or show your assignment work to any other person (including by posting it on the forum) apart from the teaching staff of COMP1511.
The work you submit must otherwise be entirely your own work. Submission of work partially or completely derived from any other person or jointly written with any other person is not permitted. The penalties for such an offence may include negative marks, automatic failure of the course and possibly other academic discipline. Assignment submissions will be examined both automatically and manually for such submissions.
Relevant scholarship authorities will be informed if students holding scholarships are involved in an incident of plagiarism or other misconduct. If you knowingly provide or show your assignment work to another person for any reason, and work derived from it is submitted you may be penalized, even if the work was submitted without your knowledge or consent. This may apply even if your work is submitted by a third party unknown to you.
Note, you will not be penalized if your work is taken without your consent or knowledge.
This assignment will contribute 15% to your final mark.
The assessment for the assignment recognizes the difficulty of the task.
5% of the marks for assignment 1 will come from your tutor reading your blog. They will assess generously any genuine attempts to record the information described above.
15% of the marks for assignment 1 will come from hand marking of the readability of the C you have written. These marks will be awarded on the basis of clarity, commenting, elegance and style. In other words, your tutor will assess how easy it is for a human to read and understand your program.
80% of the marks for this assignment will be based on the performance of your program on a set of images which you have not seen.
Here is an indicative marking scheme.
| 90+% | recognizes many challenge captchas, beautiful code, well blogged |
| 80% | recognizes 90+% of captchas correctly, very readable code, well blogged |
| 70% | recognizes 90+% of digits, readable code, well blogged |
| 55% | recognizes 50+% of digits, decent code, blogged |
| -70% | Knowingly providing your work to anyone and it is subsequently submitted (by anyone). |
| -70% | Submitting any other person's work. This includes joint work. |
| 0 FL for COMP1511 | Paying another person to complete work. Submitting another person's work without their consent. |
The lecturer may vary the assessment scheme after inspecting the assignment submissions but it will remain broadly similar to the description above.
If your assignment is submitted after this date, each hour it is late reduces the maximum mark it can achieve by 2%. For example if an assignment worth 74% was submitted 10 hours late, the late submission would have no effect. If the same assignment was submitted 15 hours late it would be awarded 70%, the maximum mark it can achieve at that time.