PessimalPrint: a reverse Turing test

This work proposes a variant of the Turing test using pessimal print: that is, low-quality images of machine-printed text synthesized pseudo-randomly over certain ranges of words, typefaces, and image degradations and shows experimentally that judicious choice of these ranges can ensure that the images are legible to human readers but illegible to several of the best present-day optical character recognition (OCR) machines.