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.

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.

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?

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?

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: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"?)

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.

[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 [sony.com] on page 8 of the PDF. By comparison, the human eye's response [ndt-ed.org] 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.

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.