Cloud-based Arabic reCAPTCHA service: Design and architecture

reCAPTCHA is a popular technique used for web security. It distinguishes humans from computer programs to protect websites from automated abuse by presenting a challenge to be solved. reCAPTCHA utilizes human computation power used in solving these challenges to aid in increasing the accuracy of digitizing printed manuscripts. Although reCAPTCHA has been developed in many languages, to date, there is no available reCAPTCHA for the Arabic language. There is an immense need for the development of an Arabic reCAPTCHA service to increase the accuracy that existing OCRs currently lacks in digitizing Arabic manuscripts, and to aid in securing millions of Arabic websites. In this paper, we present a cloud-based design and architecture for an Arabic reCAPTCHA service, and we detail and describe key design and system components which include word classification algorithms, database schema design, and technology selection. We also study the inadequacy of existing popular OCRs in recognizing correctly Arabic printed text.