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.

Comments

Mod Parent Up

[Max Littlemore]

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?

Re:Kill the barcode!

[Mr. Roadkill]

The idea is that this will not be visible to the naked eye - you should be cheering this announcment as a way to get rid of the barcodes that you hate but still keep the information.

Um... I thought that was exactly what I was doing, while also pointing out a possible problem with certain kinds of image. Things might get interesting if you're embedding patterns of yellow in an image that consists of a uniform white, or - for that matter - any other uniform or near-uniform colour. I suspect that under some circumstances it WOULD introduce visible artifacts - it would need to shift the yellow balance in sufficiently large blocks for crappy cameraphones to be able to pick it up, so if you're adding that to a solid white or some other solid or near-solid colour it may be visible.

(and who the hell modded me OT? Did they actually RTFA? And do they still have enough modpoints to come back and mod this "Flamebait"?)