I'm suggesting that it's easier to detect text from these "mediocre at best" photos. Classifying objects in a visual space often deal with low quality images. In fact, the algorithms have to deal with the objects they're trying to classify at many different resolutions. While captchas are generally hard to identify even for humans, because they're contorted and confusing, the numbers in these addresses are all standardized numbers in grainy environments.
I would even go as far to argue that if these become widely used, we're going to see algorithmic "solvers" for this captcha in a matter of weeks.
Maybe Google is just crowd sourcing an algorithm for this problem! Then they will move onto another of the image recognition problems they have, and they get the spammers to make the data improving algorithms...
I don't really understand that response. What I'm saying is that if these addresses become one of the actually-checked human-verifiers, it will be easier to circumvent, because those numbers look comparably easier for a virtual classifier to evaluate.
The house numbers are easier for a computer to classify than the messy, weird contorted letters.
I would even go as far to argue that if these become widely used, we're going to see algorithmic "solvers" for this captcha in a matter of weeks.