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.

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!

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.

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 !

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?

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.)

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!....}