We'll reserve judgment until we see which mischief makers decide to wreak whatever mischief with it, but Fujitsu Laboratories says they have a new way to embed data invisibly in a printed color image, a technique that buries numeric characters up to twelve digits into 1cm x 1cm-size images.
"People won't need to have dedicated space for things like barcodes," said Fujitsu researcher Tsugio Noda, announcing the new technology.
Fujitsu said this technology can put an original image and embeddable data together into code and then print them as a single picture, which can be taken into a telephone camera and decoded by specific software for users to make calls or access the Web.
The embedding is done in yellow-dot form, dividing an original image into small blocks and adjusting for gradation in line with levels of adjacent blocks, Fujitsu said. By "leveraging" the yellow property the human eye can't see clearly, and by degrading that color as well as the effect of using an area not exceeding .8mm square, the company said, they put imperceptible data in a printed picture.
"We expect an ordinary mobile device to take one second for this reading," Noda said.
Representatives of Norton AntiVirus makers Symantec and antivirus and security company McAfee were unavailable, before this story went to press, to discuss whether the new Fujitsu technique could indeed open a new lane for bug writers to pass their bugs around cyberspace. We will have more information about that prospect as it becomes available.
