Adding background noise to captcha - PHP

The original captcha is perfectly clean; there is no background noise, which you can see in other captcha systems. Let's add background noise to the existing captcha script above.

Step 1. Start the session. Generate a random number and assign the number to the session variable. This session variable is used when passing the correct answer to the web form, and then to the PHP script that will validate the answer in the actual web application:

<?php

session_start();

$stringgen = mt_rand(1000, 9999);

$_SESSION['answer']=$stringgen;

Step 2. Create a 50 x 50 pixel image, and then declare the background and text color of the captcha:

$imagecreate = imagecreate(50, 50);

// white background and blue text

$background = imagecolorallocate($imagecreate, 0, 0, 255);

$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($imagecreate, 255, 255, 255);

Step 3. Using the background noise script discussed at the link adds a sprinkling of pixel dots on the existing, created image that constitutes background noise.

You can randomly sprinkle the dots on the image using the loop function below, and the imagesetpixel function, which will draw a single pixel on the image defined by random $x and $y coordinates:

for ($c = 0; $c < 40; $c++){

   $x = rand(0,50-1);

   $y = rand(0,50-1);

   imagesetpixel($imagecreate, $x, $y, $textcolor);

   }

The pixel coordinates should be dependent on the size of the image (which is 50 x 50 pixels). This is why the boundary is set in the random number generation (0, 49) with the maximum possible coordinate (49,49).

The number of white pixel dots in the 50 x 50 pixel image is estimated to be around 40, which is defined by the for loop: $c<40

To increase captcha difficulty, since the font color of the original captcha text is white (defined by $textcolor = imagecolorallocate($imagecreate, 255, 255, 255);) the color of the pixel dot background noise should also be set to white (defined by imagesetpixel($imagecreate, $x, $y, $textcolor);  

Step 4. Draw the captcha, now with background noise as defined in the previous steps, horizontally on the image:

$xlocation = rand(1,10);

$ylocation = rand(1,10);

imagestring($imagecreate, 5, $xlocation, $ylocation, $stringgen, $textcolor);

The string will also be positioned randomly in the image, as defined at the $xlocation and  $ylocation variables.

Step 5. Finally, output the generated image as PNG in the web browser:

header("Content-type: image/png");

$image= imagepng($imagecreate);

?>

The final generated script will be:

<?php

session_start();

$stringgen = mt_rand(1000, 9999);

$_SESSION['answer']=$stringgen;

$imagecreate = imagecreate(50, 50);

$background = imagecolorallocate($imagecreate, 0, 0, 255);

$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($imagecreate, 255, 255, 255);

for ($c = 0; $c < 40; $c++){

   $x = rand(0,50-1);

   $y = rand(0,50-1);

   imagesetpixel($imagecreate, $x, $y, $textcolor);

   }

$xlocation = rand(1,10);

$ylocation = rand(1,10);

imagestring($imagecreate, 5, $xlocation, $ylocation, $stringgen, $textcolor);

header("Content-type: image/png");

$image= imagepng($imagecreate);

?>

Below are the captchas generated using first solution: http://www.php-developer.org/firstcaptchasolution.php

And the following screen shot reveals the evaluation results using the Tesseract optical character recognition engine:

According to the results, the OCR still correctly answers the captcha challenges. This means that the background noise setting at $c < 40 is not effective in adding difficulty to the original challenge.

It is highly recommended that you increase the level of background noise, but continue to make the original security code text visible to humans.