identiPIC is a photo CAPTCHA system whereby a website visitor has to identify a picture
to proceed. The system is typically used on web forms to block
spambots. A human can identify a picture, a spambot cannot.
The web is awash with spambots that attack contact forms,
guestbooks, forums etc. Up until now, the main line of defence against
them was the CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA is a test to tell humans apart from
computers (spambots in this case) that relies on the user entering a
string of characters presented to them in an image. This worked well
for a while until the bots began to overcome them by reading them with
OCR (optical character recognition) programs. Another problem with the
traditional CAPTCHA is that they are sometimes difficult to read. The
advantage of the identiPIC system is that a computer cannot tell what a
picture is of but a human can clearly see what it is.