Google developers report they have dramatically improved the algorithm for recognizing numbers in addresses in Street View. They worked togethers with the developers of Google's anti-spam service reCaptcha to be able to recognize 90% of the hard to read numbers of houses. According to the developers they are also able to solve 99% of all Captchas from other vendors.
Google claims its new algorithm can detect difficult numbers in Street View 90 percent of the time. According to a joint paper by Google’s Street View and reCAPTCHA teams (PDF), recognizing the house numbers from pictures taken by the StreetView cars is a hard to solve problem.
That's because the pictures were taken from different angles, with variations in lightning and when in motion. Nevertheless Google has put a lot of work into recognizing the numbers, which helps them in improving navigation on maps.
To achieve the improved recognition the developers used a neural network that has been optimized for recognizing numbers in images. Hard numbers were actually cracked by the daily hundred of million users filling in Captchas used to prevent spammers from sending messages or signing up to sites.
