I'm having trouble preprocessing this CAPTCHA image to be read in by an OCR like Tesseract.
I am having specific trouble with the vertical line intersecting the u.
Tesseract is having no problem at all reading k3cvx. The kerning between ju5k along with the vertical line contribute to the inaccuracy of Tesseract.
I've tried diluting and eroding the image but it reduces the quality of the letters to a point where it is unreadable by Tesseract.
Original Image - no further preprocessing:
Second Image - After trying to remove vertical lines using the solution found here:
Third Image - Median Filter then erosion applied to the second image:
Any help would be appreciated.