MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap [video]

Comments in case the demo developer sees this:<p>* The swiping in the demo was a rough for me, on a laptop with Firefox. One of the tricks was to be sure to release the mouse button before the pointer hits the edge of white rectangle fake screen. Swiping off the edge without a button-up event doesn&#x27;t seem to be handled.<p>* At the end of a swipe that registers, after you mouse-up, there&#x27;s a noticeable lag of sometimes up to approx. one second, during which the card is frozen in place, before it finishes sliding off.<p>* The rotation effect on the card as it&#x27;s being swiped wasn&#x27;t intuitive, IMHO. It doesn&#x27;t follow the vertical movement in the swipe, and there&#x27;s no obvious physical metaphor for why it&#x27;s doing that. Perhaps especially with the other roughness going on, the rotation confuses things a little bit more; but maybe, if the other behavior was perfect, the rotation would be fine.

Fun and potentially useful project, love it! When I tried it though, it was quite often hard to see whether the bounding box is &quot;really&quot; correct, as it hides what&#x27;s underneath. Maybe some slight opaqueness could help.<p>Also, my first image had no bounding box at all. Being met by &quot;Swipe right if the red shape is correctly outlining a building. If not swipe left&quot;, it felt like the wording or the UX could be improved by filtering for images that are guaranteed to have such a box.

I applaud the effort but in the demo I am unsure how this could be used as a CAPTCHA. The examples I saw could be trivially solved with a bot running a simple CNN image classifier model.<p>The training data is available, existing OSM building outlines and satellite data scraped from Google, and training a image classifier would be very straightforward. I am sure a bot would have a much higher success rate than a person.

playing with the demo at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maptcha.crown-shy.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maptcha.crown-shy.com&#x2F;</a> , I had problems recognizing the outlines, as they often were colored similar to their structure (low contrast). Some examples I couldn&#x27;t find any outline at all.<p>Also, seeing a rectangular outlined thing from above, it&#x27;s often impossible to tell if it qualifies as a building.

Another project that would certainly benefit from crowdsourcing is the OpenMetroMaps[1]. Lack of the good universal public transportation website and mobile app is disheartening. I know there&#x27;s is Transportr[2][3] but it&#x27;s coverage is still pretty limited.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenMetroMaps">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenMetroMaps</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transportr.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transportr.app&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grote&#x2F;Transportr">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grote&#x2F;Transportr</a>

This is amazing. Much prefer this to helping train autonomous vehicles.

My issue isn&#x27;t that it does or does not highlight an area, it is that sometimes it highlights an area that is not a building and the instructions are a bit vague as to is this is &quot;correct&quot; or not. One example - I see it highlighting someone&#x27;s back yard with a swimming pool. It is not a building. Is this correct or not? I mean,it has identified the shape perfectly, but it is not a building. I feel like lazy people clicking through CAPTCHA is not the place to make important decisions on OpenStreetMap map level features without a <i>lot</i> of filtering of the results.

I had a go, but there were a few I wasn&#x27;t really sure by. To the creator, can you add a &quot;Not sure&quot; option?

I’m not sure how effective captchas really are at filtering out bots. But if they do work, I’d much rather have my efforts contribute to a public good like OSM rather than feeding data to Google, which seems to be the default these days.<p>If anyone from OSM is listening, it would be great to have a way to flag malicious uses of captchas, like in phishing attempts. The existing captcha platforms make this very hard.

As I said elsewhere I applaud the idea, a couple of comments.<p>1. On Firefox on Ubuntu the text is _far_ too faint, to the extent the initial text is essentially unreadable.<p>2. I was getting brown coloured areas surrounded by a slightly different brown colour. The outlined area could have been a roof or just some slight change in l and colour. I understand this is why help is needed to classify them but it felt wrong clicking either &quot;Correct&quot; or &quot;Incorrect&quot; ... maybe with enough input it doesn&#x27;t matter ? Not sure.

A sideways look. The predominant business model for the internet is tracking users (for what is often called &quot;advertising&quot;). This is caused by the value of internet transactions being so very tiny, and there is no other way to charge that amount. But here is another business model. The &quot;fee&quot; is proof of work, as in the helping make the product better. Cool.

Can the demo write &quot;successful&quot; or &quot;unsuccessful&quot;? :) It&#x27;s hard to know how well it works otherwise

I tried it on a desktop PC and on some images the bounding box is so small that you cannot see clearly if it&#x27;s ok

Half the time it shows me a picture with no frame and asks me what it is, or it shows a frame and I cannot understand what it is. So an &quot;I don&#x27;t know &quot; option should be added to use this in production.

I did 3 tests, two didn’t have a red shape

As others have noted, this is very easy to solve using a bot, it is easier for a bot than a human.

Does it guard against blind people?

This is so cool! Was so sad to mis this on FOSDEM!

please make an AGPL3+ paid service out of this, so companies can use this instead of google xD