2009 International Conference on Multimedia Information Networking and Security
A CAPTCHA Implementation Based on 3D Animation
Jing-Song Cui, Jing-Ting Mei, Xia Wang, Da Zhang, Wu-Zhou Zhang
College of Computer Science
Wuhan University
cuijs, mystline, 7341137, 182028431, 527042006@qq.com
Abstract—In order to distinguish between human users and
computer programs, CAPTCHA (Completely Automated
Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart)
mechanism is widely applied in websites such as accounts
application website. While the major implementation of
CAPTCHA method—2D still image verification code based on
OCR technology is threatened by developing artificial
intelligence and image recognition technologies. In this paper,
we propose a new approach to implement CAPTCHA
mechanism based on 3D Animation, utilizing the weakness of
computer vision, which make it robust to computer attacks and
convenient for users to recognize, and implemented this
method to generate a 3D animation verification code.
Keywords-CAPTCHA;VerificationCode;Moving objects;
Three-dimensional Animation
I. INTRODUCTION
Internet is crucial to each respect of life all over the globe
nowadays, through which we could retrieve and exchange
information freely and efficiently. Given the fundamental
relation between internet and people’ s life, vast malicious
computer programs attack websites for profits, such as auto
application for some mails’ accounts to send junk e-mails,
etc. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test
to tell Computers and Human Apart) system emerges to
solve this problem by identifying end-users of internet
whether a real person or an automated computer
program[1][2][3]. It also prevents malicious computer
program impropriating limited resources on internet and
maintains the security of internet. The key point of
CAPTCHA is the question that human users could get
answers easily while the current computer programs could
not afford the right answer yet.
CAPTCHA is first proposed by a study group of
Carnegie Mellon University and studied by researchers all
over the world after its appearance. Currently, CAPTCHA
methods are generally divided into two groups: OCR-based
methods and Non-OCR-based methods[2].
OCR-based methods provide images of words with
distortion and various pictorial effects and ask users to type
the words. Due to the presence of pictorial effects, computer
programs encounter problems in the recognition process and
only human users are capable of recognizing words easily.
This sort of method is based on the weak points of optical
character recognition (OCR) programs that it is difficult to
recognize reading texts printed with a low quality and
reading manuscripts[4], which brings to us possibility that
certain form of images of word can be recognized only by
human users but not by any OCR program in a certain extent.
Now, this kind of method has become the major pattern of
978-0-7695-3843-3/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MINES.2009.298
CAPTCHA mechanism applications, prevailing in most
login pages for users to sign up for new accounts, which
could prevent spammers from using automated methods to
register thousands of free online accounts, as shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1. Simple OCR_based CAPTHA
However, as OCR technology based on neural network
and artificial intelligence develops[9], the security of such
OCR-based CAPTCHA suffers more and more serious
threats. Take some famous portal sites for example, Yahoo,
as the first user website of CAPTCHA mechanism, its
CAPTCHA systems used to prevent automated registration
of free Yahoo Mail accounts have been defeated by a
software released by a Russian researcher with the
recognition rate about 30%[6]. Microsoft live mail was also
captured by the junk mail many times[7][8]. For that reason,
an increasing number of OCR-based CAPTCHA designers
think out the solution that they add a large amount of
miscellaneous interference information into the image to
reinforce verification’s robustness, which unfortunately leads
difficulty for human to recognize the word, as shown in
Figure 2.
Figure 2. Complex OCR_based CAPTCHA
Non-OCR-based methods are based on the features of
multimedia systems such as pictures and sounds and usually
using methods like small puzzle games[4]. Such as PIX,
which ask users to select pictures of certain subject among
pictures of various subjects [1]. Besides this, there are a lot
of methods, for example, CAPTCHA algorithm proposed by
Y. Rui is based on recognition of human face[10],
CAPTCHA technology developed by R. Datta is based on
recognition of photos in daily life[11], CAPTCHA algorithm
proposed by J. Elson is relied on judgment of the similarity
of photos[12], etc.
In this paper we propose a Non-OCR-based CAPTCHA
method in the form of 3D animation and based on the
recognition of moving objects in videos. The rest part of this
paper is organized as follows: In section 2, we analyze the
crucial point of designing the new CAPTCHA mechanism
by concerning about the defects of current tracking moving
objects methods, and then we describe the major generating
step of this new CAPTCHA method. In section 3 we
illustrate the flow chart by implementing our method step by
step. Section 4 concludes with a summary and comment on
future research.
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 II. DESIGN
In the field of computer vision, there are some main
algorithms on detection of moving objects in video, such as
frame difference method[13][14], optical flow method[19],
temporal difference algorithm[17][18], background
subtraction method[15][16], etc. While all of these
algorithms have their own defects in tracking moving objects,
for example, optical flow method can’t do real-time
monitoring well[15], template matching algorithm can’t tell
the difference between the target objects from the
interference objects when they are in similar shape[20], and
frame difference method may miss target objects or just
abstract a little part of target[21], background subtraction
method could not get right information when target objects
and background looks similar[13]. Moving objects
recognition is more difficult to solve than optical character
recognition nowadays in a great extent. It’s especially
difficult to track numerous real-time moving objects in a
complicated background for computer[5], but easier for
human users. Therefore, the implementation method of
CAPTCHA based on the recognition of moving objects
could utilize those defects to improve the safety of
CAPTCHA.
A. Main idea
In the design of 3D animation, we make continuous
frames to form a complete animation, which means that, we
need to design each frame picture and make them show one
by another to generate an animation. And the new kind of
CAPTCHA is still shown in the form of characters for users
to recognize, but characters are hidden in 3D animation.
Firstly, we determine the shown location of verification
code in the animation screen and the objects’ attributes like
colors, shapes in the animation. From each frame to another,
the objects in animation are in movement, so we need to set
each object’s moving orbits at first. Secondly, in the duration
of objects’ moving, we compare the shown position of the
verification code to the position of each moving object, if
objects are in the position of supposed verification code’s
shown position, the corresponding moving objects will be
changed in one attribute of themselves.
In this way, the showing process of verification code is a
dynamic process comparing to the showing method of 2D
still image verification code. Only when we see the moving
process, we could get the right characters shown in the
animation. This is the zero knowledge per frame principle in
our design, which means that each frame of the animation
would not leak any information of the verification code. The
moving objects’ attributes changing is the key reason of the
showing of verification code in the animation, so only when
we see the animation we could capture the content of it. This
principle assures that our method could resist the current
OCR attacks. As a result, computer programs could only
retrieve characters’ information by detecting moving objects
in animation.
In the field of computer vision, the current method also
can’t help a lot. Firstly, because of the preset various moving
orbit of each moving object and massive moving objects in
animation, it’s hard to get clear distinction between frames
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and focus on the obvious moving objects with crucial
information, so frame difference method properly would
miss tracking target of animation. What’s more, via this
avenue of showing characters, it’s hard to detect the crucial
moving objects with important information of CAPTCHA,
because animation is full of similar moving objects. This
makes our method avoid the detection method such as
temporal difference algorithm and background subtraction
method by taking advantages of their weak points listed
above. Meanwhile, intending to get information from 3D
animation requires real-time detection, while real-time
monitoring is still the defect of optical flow method.
As we’ve discussed above, our new method of generating
3D animation as the carrier of verification code could suffer
current OCR attacks to 2D still image verification code and
recognition attacks aiming at moving objects in computer
vision field.
B. Algorithm of design
According to the main design idea of new CAPTCHA,
we design the flowing algorithms to implement our ideas, as
Figure 3 shows.
Figure 3. Algorithm of generating new CAPTCHA
Step 1, we choose some elements from one or more sets,
such as English alphabet set or Arabic numerals set, to
consist the original set of the verification code, which should
meet the needs of the human’s easy recognition of these
elements from the original set.
Step 2, we randomly select 3 or more elements from the
original set to form the verification code and determine the
position information of it in the animation screen expressed
in the way of pixel coordinate according to the size of the
animation screen we set.
Step 3, the aim of this step is to draw a single frame of
the animation. The animation is generated by the consistent
drawing of frames. At first, we set the number of drawn
frame 0.
1. When we draw the first frame in the animation,
we need to decide the total number of the moving objects in
the frame, the initial position information of each object, and
the showing attributes such as the color, the size and the
shape of the moving objects. What’s more, we should
determine every object’s moving track and select one
attribute of their own as the changing attribute of all the
moving objects. In the following frame’s drawing, we only
need to decide each object’s current position information by
the position information in the prior frame and the moving
track; others still the same as the prior frame.
2. In each frame’s painting, we need to compare the
pixel coordinate of each object and the pixel coordinate of
the verification code. If they are the same, the object’s the position of elements in the matrix to the position of
changing attribute should be changed, which means that the pixels in the animation screen, in which way we can
current value of the object’s changing attribute should be determine the pixel coordinates of the verification code in
replaced by other elements except itself in the attribute’s the animation screen. For example, if the pixel coordinate in
source set randomly. the animation screen is (i, j), then the corresponding location
3. After one frame’s drawing, the drawn frame of the element in the matrix is the location of row (100-j)
number plus 1, the pixel data of this frame is reserved in the column i. As Figure 5 shows, this is number 7’s 01 matrix.
memory areas.
Step 4, we set the total number of frames of the
animation, and loop Step 3 until the drawn frame number
reaches the total number of frames of the animation. All the
pixel data of each frame is preserved in GIF format or AVI
format.
III. THE IMPLEMENTATION OF
THREE-DIMENSIONAL ANIMATION CAPTCHA
We implemented the new design utilizing VC++ and
OPENGL. We show the details in Figure 4.

Figure 5. 01 Matrix of “7”

Step 3, it’s the step to draw the frame of the animation. In

Figure 4. Example of generating a 3D animation verification code
Step 1, we choose some elements from English alphabet
and Arabic numerals consisting the original source set of
verification code, except some elements that may confused
with each other in shape, in order to make the verification
code much easier to be recognized such as the number 0
and the letter O, their shape is similar. The set is as following
{A,B,D,E,F,P,Q,R,T,U,V,X,Y,H,J,K,L,M,N,3,4,6,7,8,9}.
Then three letters are selected randomly from the original
source set to form a verification code. We change the
verification code in form of matrix with elements of 0 and
1in which the number of rows is 100 and the number of
columns is 240.The example is shown in Figure 5, which
shows the shape of number 7. The areas of element 1 in the
matrix form the shape of a letter or a number as the area of
the verification code, and the areas of element 0 are outside
the verification code’s area.
Step 2, we set the screen size of the animation of 240
pixels*100 pixels. With the reflection function, we change
each frame, we used 150*150 points constituting a grid
pattern, which means that 22500 points work as the vertexes
of small quadrangles form a big quadrangle as a grid pattern.
The vertexes are expressed in the way of coordinates of X, Y
and Z, which determine the position of each quadrangle in
the grid pattern. The value of X and Y is a fixed, but the
value of Z is determined by a sin function. We randomly set
the color of each small quadrangle from the color set of red,
green, and blue. At last, we set color as the changing
attribute of this animation.
In the animation, after each 3 frames’ drawing, each
point’s value of coordinate Z is replaced by the adjacent right
point’s, and the points located in the rightmost column in the
grid is replaced by the corresponding points’ value of
coordinate Z in the leftmost column in the same row.
Figure 6. Example of changing of points’ value of coordinate z
Let’s take an example, in Figure 6, when exchanging
happens, the Point 1’s value of coordinate Z is replaced by
the value of coordinate Z of Point 2. Because Point A, B, C
and D are the points in the rightmost column in the grid
pattern, their value of coordinate Z should be replaced by the
Point a, b, c, and d correspondingly.

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 Meanwhile, we set the rotation angle around X axis and
Y axis and Z axis to make the grid pattern in the animation
seem like a motive wave, which makes the moving track
much more complex.
When this step is called the second time or more, the
following measures should be taken. The total number of the
small quadrangles in the grid pattern, the moving track and
the changing attribute set in the first frame’s drawing
remains unchanged, and the color of each quadrangle is the
same as the prior frame. We only should change the position
of each quadrangle by the moving track and the position in
the prior frame.
Step 4, we calculate the center point of each quadrangle
by the position information from Step 3 expressed in the way
of 3D coordinate(x, y, z), then change it to the 2D pixel
coordinate as ( i , j ).
Step5, we judge the pixel coordinate of the position of
each quadrangle’s center point whether or not in the pixel
coordinate regions of the verification code in the animation
screen. If it is, go to Step6; else, go to Step 7.
Step 6, we change the color of the quadrangle to other
colors randomly, for example, if the color of the quadrangle
is red, then it may change to green or blue.
Step 7, according to the position and color of small
quadrangles, we draw the grid pattern in this frame. Then
there would be a loop, we call Step 3 to make the continuous
drawing of frames to produce an animation showing the
verification code in the screen.
Step 8, we record the animation for some time and
reserved it as 3D animation CAPTCHA in the type of GIF,
which would make it convenient to be utilized in the web
page.
IV. CONCLUSION
In our research, we have developed design of new
CAPTCHA and implemented it in one case. In this study we
make our design of CAPTCHA in a new field—the
recognition of moving objects, and we propose a new design
principle— zero knowledge per frame principle. In the field
of computer vision, the current major methods of detecting
moving objects are not much practical yet, and our design
make use of the defects of these methods to provide
difficulties for computer programs’ recognition of this new
CAPHTCHA. And the zero-knowledge per frame principle
makes it much more impossible for computer programs to
identify the content of CAPTCHA in each frame, so that
computer programs using the OCR method which tackles
with current 2D still image verification code cannot solve
this difficulty.
What’s more, this method is convenient for human to
recognize, which assures its practicality. How can make the
new CAPTCHA much safer to resist attacks and much easier
for human to recognize is still the main topic of our future
study.
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is supported by NSFC 60603012, NSFC
60703009.
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