[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > This can be interesting: > http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/03/01/2340238.shtml > > Bearophile
Hey, that DataGlyph demo works pretty neat. <quote> Decoding your DataGlyph. DataGlyph decoded successfully. four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal To test the robustness and error correction DataGlyphs provide, you might want to "damage" a DataGlyph by editing it with paint program, obscuring some of the marks and uploading the damaged image for decoding. Serious aficionados have been known to print out their DataGlyph, spill some coffee on it, tear off small pieces, fold it into a paper airplane, run over it with a car, light small portions on fire, then scan the document back in and try to extract the message. If you are such an enthusiast, have fun, be safe, and remember even great technologies have their limits. </quote> Of course, being an old System Test Engineer whose job it was to figure out how to break software, I couldn't let this challenge go unanswered. So, picking up the gauntlet, I broke it in 5 seconds. <quote> Decoding your DataGlyph. Decoding dataglyph59683-2.bmp... Unable to decode this dataglyph Top 5 reasons a DataGlyph might fail to decode 1. Hey... that's not a DataGlyph 2. Not enough of the DataGlyph is present 3. Way too much damage 4. Trouble locating the DataGlyph 5. Cosmic rays Usually if a human being can make out the individual marks, the decoding software should also be able to do so. This online decoder is optimized for scanned images from a paper documents. If you are a technical user evaluating DataGlyphs, please be aware that this online DataGlyph decoder is expecting mainstream DG500 DataGlyphs. This online decoder will not work if you are testing a specialized DataGlyph variant such as serpentone, yellow DataGlyph or address carpet. Finally, note that a customized image processing front-end or a customized DataGlyph locator algorithm might yield better results in application scenarios such as handheld camera images with severe perspective distortion. </quote> Naturally, the real answer is none of the above. And the damage can be undone in 5 seconds also. And, under the right circumstances, an undamaged DataGlyph could suffer the same fate (which also implies that the damaged DataGlyph could be read under the same circumstances). ObPuzzle: how did I "damage" the image? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
