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

Anyone remember Digital Convergence?

[plover]

I hope their business plan calls for Fujitsu to give away decoders like Digital Convergence did with :CueCats.

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.

Re:Anyone remember Digital Convergence?

[slash.dt]

This is software and will work with any digital camera - though you would want to use a web-enabled device like your cellphone so that you can go to the link. So there is no need for dedicated hardware.

Scary Tech

[excelblue]

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?

Re:Scary Tech

[spagetti_code]

The unique identification of many (soon to me most or all) inkjets and color lasers was not
done for you or me. It was done quietly for law enforcement to be able
to *find* the owner of any printed document.

The enormity of that type of underhanded removal of privacy is
just gobsmacking. And most vendors quietly went along with it.

This technology will no doubt be used in a similar vein - any
picture uploaded onto the internet can be traced back to *you*.

Freedom takes another blow.

Re:Scary Tech

[mrogers]

That's why I always write ransom notes by hand, using my own blood.

Re:Scary Tech

[mopower70]

That's why I always write ransom notes by hand, using my own blood. Take my word for it: that's how you get caught. You need to write the note in HER blood.

Kill the barcode!

[Mr. Roadkill]

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...

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"?)

truthiness

[President_Camacho]

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.

Re:truthiness

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cut the politically correct bullshit. It's nigga filter.

Filter stole my bike!

Secret message

[StikyPad]

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

Re:Secret message

[UnknownSoldier]

#include <stdio.h>
 
char 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";
 
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    int v = 0;
    char *p = m;
    while( *p )
    {
        if (*p == ' ')
        {
            printf( "%c", v );
            v = 0;
        }
        else
        {
            v <<= 1;
            v += ((*p == '0') ? 0 : 1);
        }
        p++;
    }
 
    return 0;
}

--
Unfortunately, Slashdot limits sigs to .120 characters. However, I was able to ingeniously circumvent this limitation by using a pseudo .sig !

Re:Secret message

[mennucc1]

echo 'ibase=2 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' | tr ' ' '\n' | bc -l | awk '{printf("%c",$1)}'

Unix by any other name would not stink^H^H^H^Hsmell differently.

There goes my business model

[alshithead]

I guess selling lemon juice for invisible ink has just been retired.

Where's Waldo?

[jlindy]

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!

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?

further development of an existing technology

[slash.dt]

Mobile phones in Japan already have a function to read barcodes - rather than the traditional barcode that the west are used to, it is a small square of barcode information which holds a lot more data.

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.

Re:further development of an existing technology

[Hal_Porter]

It's called QR code

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code

The idea is that you print them on business cards, and people can scan your name and phone number into their phone quickly. Kind of useful in Japan where you end up with piles of business cards quite quickly.

Why not Semacode?

[mungewell]

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

They put a CueCat in my phone!

[Panaflex]

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?

Re:They Live

[troylanes]

Don't forget OBEY
Has anyone else noticed that the fight scene in They Live is nearly exactly the same choreography as in the Cripple Fight episode of South park?

A very amateurish method.

[jd]

Why not use a 4-colour printer, where you have red, green, blue and then some non-primary colour that is monochromatic? A 0 is represented by the colour mix, a 1 by the monochromatic version. Just as easy to discern, as the monochromatic pixels will be picked up differently (giving you essentially the same shift as their technique) but would involve ZERO distortion of the image. "Hard to discern" is not the same as "no visible change".

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.)

Re:A very amateurish method.

[Stubtify]

The benefit to the method described in the article (which is probably just modifying the yellow dot's angle and slightly shifting the image) is that it can be done on any 4 color press. You could modify the image accordingly, and when the printer prints it your done. Anyone printing the file would probably not need to even know there is a hidden pattern. This opens you up to using and 4 color (CMYK) printer in the world.

Your idea however requires special ink, as well as extra heads on the press. For a magazine run this is totally impractical. That's why most specialty printing is done seperate and then glued to a tab inside the magazine.

Then again, in re-reading your post, I'm not exactly sure what you're suggesting. RGB are not colors used in printing (they are display colors), and your discussion of bits sounds like you're talking about a direct digital reading of the data. The article discusses taking a *very* lossy cameraphone photo of something in a magazine, and allowing this pattern (probably a purposely made moiré pattern) to be run through software and decoded. The reason it works is because yellow ink is transparent to us, and the dots cannot be seen by the human eye.

Re:A very amateurish method.

[NMerriam]

So why didn't Fujitsu go with this method?

You've basically reinvented Gray Component Replacement (GCR) and Under Color Removal (UCR), and they have nothing to do with hiding information. Replacing colors on the press in what is a theoretically neutral way is already done for many reasons.

You're also depending on a perfect press, which doesn't exist (there are no bits or pixels on paper) -- you can't really swap ink mixtures in and out transparently. There is always a bit of difference due solely to the density of ink, humidity, paper, etc, so there are aesthetic reasons for replacing inks on the press in one way or the other.

99% of the full-color printers on Earth are set up for 4 colors -- Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. The Yellow plate is the one we're least visually sensitive to, which is why they're using it to put information on. Your desktop printer is 4-color, not RGB (although it does all the processing in RGB). Adding extra plates or colors to printers is a hugely expensive and complicated undertaking, nobody is going to do it just to add something that isn't even visible.

Re:A very amateurish method.

[jd]

Correction taken. CMYB (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black) is the standard for printing, yes. CMY is basically RGB rotated, so the printing press would then use a mix of the three primary colours for everything other than red, green or blue. The red, green and blue would need to be inks that were specifically designed to be very pure wavelengths, so they would not be your regular mixes by any stretch. The idea is that a composite red and a pure, monochromatic red should look like exactly the same red to the human eye. However, you want it such that a composite red and a monochrome red have different characteristics as far as the CCD is concerned.

You'll find an example CCD distribution for Sony's ICX285AL CCD on page 8 of the PDF. By comparison, the human eye's response looks very different, with different receptors in each case picking up what is nominally the same colour.

You are correct, this would be horribly expensive. I think I may have mentioned that myself, in my original post. :) It would double the cost of the machines and quadruple the cost of ink. At least. It would also halve the effective throughput.

Low-end vs. high-end phones

[tepples]

...easy for camera phones to decode... Most low-end prepaid cell phones that I have seen in stores in my part of the United States do not include a digital camera. Therefore, Fujitsu would have to either 1. market this technology to advertisers trying to reach people with high-end phones, or 2. deploy more camera phones.

Re:Low-end vs. high-end phones

[jamar0303]

In Japan almost every phone sold is a cameraphone (only a couple of mid-range phones are sold with a cameraless version, mainly on their CDMA carrier, KDDI) and a barcode system called QR code has been in place for a long time that does what this is supposed to do (except that it was a 2D "barcode").

Re:Low-end vs. high-end phones

[Dogtanian]

Most low-end prepaid cell phones that I have seen in stores in my part of the United States do not include a digital camera. Therefore, Fujitsu would have to either 1. market this technology to advertisers trying to reach people with high-end phones, or 2. deploy more camera phones. The United States mobile phone market is different to the European market is different to the Japanese market.

In the UK, camera phones are widely available for £50 inc. tax (US$90 approx) upwards, which is what most people would be spending on a phone anyway. (Sure, this isn't "low-end"- you can pick up a Nokia 1101 and the like for £20- but most day-to-day mobile phone users will be buying in the £50-£100 range).

Anyhow, it strikes me that this technology would be most successful in Japan (different again); they've already got stuff like that which is popular there.

Modding code as funny?...

[StressGuy]

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!....}