Slashdot Mirror
Camera Phones Read Hidden Messages in Print
pikine writes "As reported by BBC News, Fujitsu has developed a technology that encodes 12-bytes of information in a printed picture by skewing yellow hue, which is difficult to discern by human eye but fairly easy for camera phones to decode using software written in Java." The first target uses are promotional contests and competitions, not entirely unlike those game pieces that need to be viewed through a colored filter.
But serioiusly, did anyone ever use a :CueCat for its business-intended purpose? Even once would be remarkable. I have no idea why someone would waste time trying this with a cell-phone, unless they were already a geek -- and then they'd be busy trying to find ways to hack it, not to use it.
John
Oh boy, another waste of technology, and why does this not seem original? If anything, it reminds me of the yellow dots some color laser printers would put on things. Surely, the same tech won't be used to prevent digital pictures, etc. at places will it?
...or your ads might be mistaken for counterfeit money.
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
You can find hidden messages everywhere... ,.. ., ...,..
Am I the only one who's annoyed by bar codes on CD covers and books?
Of course, this probably wouldn't fare too well on a re-issue of the White Album...
Consume. Breed. Sleep.
I bet this results in some interesting watermark lawsuits in the next little while.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
not entirely unlike those game pieces that need to be viewed through a colored filter
I believe these days, the correct term is African-American filter.
Wizard Needs Food, Badly
fnord
I've already found the hidden message. Actually, once I learned of the technique, I was surprised at just how many of these hidden messages exist.
****SPOILER WARNING****
01000010 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01001111 01110110 01100001 01101100 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100101 00101110
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I guess selling lemon juice for invisible ink has just been retired.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
All that development money for a high tech version of Where's Waldo? O.K. So now for the obligatory... But I'm color blind you insensitive clods!
Who are these donkeys who mod fantastically bad puns down just because they contain references to terms which may be politically sensitive or incorrect? I mean come on, that pun was beautifully apalling. Moderating it as troll seems to lack an understanding of what trolling is.
I have a good mind to suggest "Nigger Filter" just to desensitize idiots with mod points so next time they see posts like the parent, they won't get their jocks all knotty. Who needs karma anyway?
I don't therefore I'm not.
...or maybe "Everyman's Barcode" since the majority of cell phones have cameras.
This will be a boon for advertisers wanting to direct traffic to their web sites.
Good...bad?
I just think it is an advance tha makes it easier for consumers.
Different? Yes. Good in a way, because now a cell phone can be deliberately used to picture a 'link' image (deliberately designated as such if desired), and users don't have to dink in the URL character by character.
You often see this barcode on advertisements next to the url - you can scan the barcode and save typing in the url. I've done it several times - even my non-techy wife uses the feature.
This new announcement seems like a way that you can embed the information without having to have an obvious barcode spoiling the picture - but you will still need some tag to let you know that there was something there worth scanning.
The artical talks about the 'advantage' that you can link a picture to a digital domain.... so why not just use semacode or Q-codes. Then the reader knows your pushing a website/etc and will actually point their phone at it!
Semacodes can store a lot more information and can be scalled to include more or less. They are FEC'ed and are quite relisiant to damage.
http://www.semacode.com/
You don't even need to use the offical Semacode decoder, there are Free projects around.
Simon
The CueCat was a device to read barcodes out of printed materials into your machine - which then linked you up to the referenced website.
Fortunately it was a commercial failure - as the "free" devices cost a huge amount of cash. I'm sure this will fare better, of course, because it utilizes customers existing equipment. But who knows what wonderful websites it'll forward you too, hmm?
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Reflectively and presidentially challenged
This method can trivially be extended to any number of non-primary colours, with sufficient distance from each other. At worst, you get four (any two mixed, plus all three, versus the monochromatic version of each), giving you four times the information that can be stored as a straight 1 or 0.
Still not enough? Then add two more states (1:3 monochrome:mixed and 2:3, respectively). This gives you 4 possible states, ie: 2 bits per pixel, ie: eight times the information of this colour distortion method, and I'm not changing a damned single pixel's value in the process.
Fujitsu's method would be much harder to extend, as it's lossy, by deliberately introducing distortions. Eventually, if you add enough distortion to an image, you'll wreck the image. My alternative is lossless. There is no noise. I'm merely substituting one method of producing a value for another method of producing exactly the same value. There is no noise. You can extend the method as far as technology is capable of distinguishing the types of composition, and the human eye is guaranteed to register ABSOLUTELY ZERO change, because value-wise, there has been absolutely zero change. You can remove the information from the image and replace it with new information as often as you like, because there has been nothing lost at any stage.
Am I some sort of genius? No, I just read the Madame Tetrachromat article on Slashdot a few years back and realized that you could use the same technique to deliberately hide information in plain sight. I also read articles explaining the limitations of RGB and why monitors cannot display all colours correctly to the human eye. By adding secondary colours in monochromatic form, you can produce a more "correct" image. By implication, the "right" colours would be hard for the eye to pick out but trivial for an RGB camera.
So why didn't Fujitsu go with this method? VHS versus Betamax. A six- or seven-colour printer might be superior in how much information it can encode. It might also be superior in the quality of colour printing it can do under normal conditions, perhaps by a significant margin in some cases. It would also be hard to sell to customers who already have perfectly good RGB printers and would be a lot more expensive. People use 6.1 megapixel digital cameras and then convert to highly-compressed JPEG format because they prefer to burn quality than burn money. This will be the same. People will accept the loss rather than pay more for a cleaner image. They always have.
(But I still think a true 7-colour printer would be damn amazing.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The article only shows an excerpt of the photo so we can't really judge the quality of the processed photo. Here's the full picture (and original PR in Japanese).
In my opinion, the processed image looks too much blueish for a good quality photo.
What _is_ entirely unlike those game pieces that need to be viewed through a colored filter?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
true story.. I developed a php script that embeds 3 bits of information on a 4x4 pixel array, using DCT and spread spectrum, but I did with the blue hue, which to my knowledge is the one humans see the worse ( because of the refraction on the crystalin, it actualy is out of focus on our eye, hence black lights from discos are blurry) hey fujitsu , hire me ! I could use a job near akihabara
1f|u|c4n|r34d|7h15|u|r34LLy|n33d|70|G37|4|L1f3|4nd |G37|L41d|u|c0mpu73r|n3rd;-))|
I wonder if it's possible to get an otherwise invisible tattoo that reads, "By the way, that'll be $19.99/month. However, please limit your shots to those who consent in the future."
I'm sure the next use someone will come up with will be a mechanism for content protection. "Sorry, this picture is not authorized. Please remain calm and wait for the police."
A finnish company, upcode (www.upcode.fi) does this with a less hidden picture, in newspapers etc. You take a picture with your camera phone, the upcode software recognizes the code on the page and the code is sent to a server and a message (be it stock quotes or bus schedule info) is sent back.
Cell phone deciphers printer's shorthand.
So my yellow tattoo wasn't such a waste after all?
To easly see the pattern of yellow in a print, go in a dark place with a bright blue LED flashlight. If you don't have any samples handy, just use some new US $20 bills. Have some color copies done at Kinkos and look for the tiny easly visable dots that show near black under blue light. In magazines, the pattern will have to be much larger to be captured by cheap low resolution cell phones with fixed focus.
The truth shall set you free!
Well, if Langdorn would have had such a phone, the movie would only wasted 20 min's of my life instead of 150...
Why make it easier for the bad guys to send secret messages in pictures?c ret-documents-or.html
See:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-hide-se
or any article on steganography.
Now if only they could reverse this process to store a picture in 12 bytes...
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Hidden in the above whitespace is the phrase "I, for one, welcome our new invisible barcode overlords".
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
...all the "Fnord!"'s. 12 bytes of UTF-16 in BMP = 6 chars. Perfect. I knew it...
Couldn't this same technique be used to embedded messages in JPGs or GIFs displayed on a monitor? I can see the spy movie where the hero gets a TinyURL and goes to that site and looks at the images through a filter to see his instructions. No, wait, that could _work_ so they'd never do it. ;-)
Kodak did something similar with their professional papers. They embedded a recurrent pattern of dots in the blue channel (yellow dye) that could be seen on a scanner but was practically impossible to see with the naked eye. Hardware scanners then incorporated a 'tigger taggant' (It's been so long it could have been tiger taggants) detector and would lock out the user from printing the image unless a security override code was used. You couldn't defeat the mechanism by scanning it yourself, either, because unless you removed the blue channel dots it would still be present in the scanned image, and thus detected at printing (Such as at the XLS8500 Kiosk booths).
They eventually stopped doing so about 3 years ago, if memory serves, due to the increased cost of the paper. As you can imagine, pre-sensitization of the the paper with the taggants required unwinding the master rolls before cutting and significantly added to the cost.
Hey!...y-you guys are just a bunch of GEEKS!....all this time....I...I've been hanging out with GEEKS!!!
{...sniff...} and I thought I really was funny and insightful! {....sob!....}
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Is this difficult to discerne in the same way that we were told lossy audio compression systems would be almost impossible to discerne from the original? That theory lasted about 5 mins, wonder how long this one will last?
Things like Shotcode and DataMatrix etc - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D_barcode/. Then there's all the watermarking schemes...
They should use this technology on clothing, nothing like looking at some digipix where your friend's shirt says I'M GAY when you thought it was just an innocent plain white tee.
That's pretty neat. Unfortunately QR codes are more or less the standard. Does anyone know of a QR Code reading MIDlet that will actually work on a variety of phones? I can't find one that works on a Moto RAZR V3i as this semacode application apparently does.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"by skewing yellow hue, which is difficult to discern by human eye but fairly easy for camera phones to decode using software written in Java." ..as opposed to software written in colorblind languages.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
import sys
m = '01000010 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01001111 01110110 01100001 01101100 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100101 00101110'.split(' ')
for s in m:
i = 0;
for b in s:
i = (i << 1) + int(b)
sys.stdout.write("%s"% chr(i))
print