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JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

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Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#151

Post by lifthrasiir »

skrebbel wrote: post #38

My bank uses some colored pixelcode not unlike this one. I scan a code on my screen using a little device that I insert the bank card into. It's cool, it works well and it's fancy, but every time I do banking I have to turn off my computer's "night light" mode. I assume lots of people use color filters for various good reasons. Are these codes resisent to that? Else I'd truly prefer oldschool monochrome QR codes, to…

I've seen worse: some machine had a built-in camera recognizing QR code, but it couldn't really control exposure so I had to manually set my phone's brightness low to get the code detected. Quick Response? Screw that.

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#152

Post by bigiain »

dsl wrote: post #148
imhoguy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we add color or even UV/IR to an existing QR code just to increase data redundancy? Backward-compatibility FTW!

It is already in the works. In 3-5 years every big box store product will have UV QR codes on every side of external packaging that encode the existing product barcode plus a unique per item ID. This is being done to improve self check out speed (no more having to find the bar code) and help with tracking receipt-less returns (this box of cereal was purchased at our store).

Do you have any hints as to what terms I should be googling for to find out more about this? I'm _very_ curious...

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#153

Post by jake_the_third »

dsl wrote: post #150
pygy_ wrote: post #133

People here seem to think that this is someone's weekend project, not the result of serious engineering from an institute of the Fraunhofer Society (which it is). The spec can be found at https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Publications/TechnicalGuidelines/... (63 pages, the BSI is the German Federal Office for Information Security, a government agency), and this is slated to become an ISO standard. Here's the Google translat…

So it is some research institutes weekend project. The process of making something an ISO standard is not as rigorous as IETF or IEEE. ISO has over 250 technical committees, cranking out useless standards all the time. Most members vote to approve whatever comes down the pipe if it doesn't impact them directly. Looking closer at the spec you linked, it is tacked on to a standard for visual checksumming of printed doc…

I've just skimmed over the both specifications and haven't noticed anything that would indicate that this is a "weekend project". In fact, I'm impressed enough that I might work on an implementation in my preferred language (assuming a decent testing dataset is available).

What exactly are the technical issues that make you dismiss this project so harshly?

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#155

Post by staticfloat »

skrebbel wrote: post #38

My bank uses some colored pixelcode not unlike this one. I scan a code on my screen using a little device that I insert the bank card into. It's cool, it works well and it's fancy, but every time I do banking I have to turn off my computer's "night light" mode. I assume lots of people use color filters for various good reasons. Are these codes resisent to that? Else I'd truly prefer oldschool monochrome QR codes, to…

This is pretty easily fixed by doing white balance correction. One piece of the barcode is always kept white, and it is used for color calibration. assuming the color transformation is constant across the entire code (which is the case in your example) you can undo some pretty large color shifts.

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#156

Post by tomp »

pygy_ wrote: post #147
tomp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am. Why do the washing machines keep washing pensioners' clothes, if they're dead weight to the economy? Because we (the intelligent / sentient / human civilisation) decided so.

Institutionalized care for the weaker members of society actually makes productive members more productive. Likewise for social security and state-run unemployment insurances. AI is coming in the form of industry automatization, in a very competitive, capitalist framework. Agriculture and resource extraction is also being automated. Capital is literally growing a brain, and once it doesn't need us it will stop feedin…

There's a number of flaws in your argument.

If automation will make agriculture more competitive, then food will get cheaper. Governments will be able to subsidise it.

Capital needs consumers to make a profit.

Politics will solve any kind of food crisis. Otherwise there will be a revolution.

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#157

Post by x13 »

neetdeth wrote: post #51
gregmac wrote: post #41

One of the nice 'features' of QR codes is they're instantly recognizable as QR codes due to the 3 registration marks, and so it's obvious you could pull out your phone and scan one (not that anyone does that). JAB codes just look like a jumble of colored pixels -- it's not obvious it's encoded data, if you were to see this "in the wild". It kind of misses another potential feature, which is registration marks could a…

Technical specification is here: https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publicat... Every JAB code has four registration patterns in the corners, as well as multiple color pallets at fixed locations.

Hey on page 29 does anyone see a pattern that resembles.. historical German symbology used by to represent national pride and a government party that rose to power in the 1920's? Am I the only one? Sorry, just popped out at me.

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#158

Post by bigiain »

nine_k wrote: post #149
jschwartzi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Printing a 400 byte payload is pretty easy, but printing a 400 byte payload that's readable at high-speed(100 scans per second) is quite a different story. You'll find that in many usage scenarios the practical upper limit for a data payload is determined less by the symbology and more by the speed and reliability at which the symbology can be read by the equipment. Many thermal printers can do 200dpi or better which…

> encode a unique key which points to a record of the desired size in some database I'm sure you understand why this is not going to work the same way as reading the actual public key. Not only it needs a network, but it also is susceptible to stealing the values from the database by just generating the (short) unique keys.

I just made a short (2048 bit) key pair, and made the public key into a QR Code (as ascii armoured text, so it could have been more dense in straight binary)

https://flic.kr/p/2cYCwfG

I could only get it into a 141x141 by dropping error correction right down to 7%, but under ideal conditions (from my monitor to an iPhone) it reads reliably, as shown. I tried a 4096 bit key, but I couldn't (as text) get it into even a 171x171 QR Code at minimum error correction without truncating (and even in ideal conditions, my phone won't reliably read 171x171 resolution QR codes...)

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#159

Post by pygy_ »

tomp wrote: post #156
pygy_ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutionalized care for the weaker members of society actually makes productive members more productive. Likewise for social security and state-run unemployment insurances. AI is coming in the form of industry automatization, in a very competitive, capitalist framework. Agriculture and resource extraction is also being automated. Capital is literally growing a brain, and once it doesn't need us it will stop feedin…

There's a number of flaws in your argument. If automation will make agriculture more competitive, then food will get cheaper. Governments will be able to subsidise it. Capital needs consumers to make a profit. Politics will solve any kind of food crisis. Otherwise there will be a revolution.

> Capital needs consumers to make a profit.

Fundamentally, demand is survival instinct, which develops under Darwinian pressure. B2B is already growing faster than B2C. Wages are globally stagnating while capital keeps on growing. The industry as a self-maximizer can be its own consumer.

> Governments will be able to subsidise it. [...] Otherwise there will be a revolution.

This assumes that humans will still have some kind of power. Being somewhat competitive in the job market is the only power most people have today.

Re: JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

#160

Post by mcpherrinm »

bigiain wrote: post #158
nine_k wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> encode a unique key which points to a record of the desired size in some database I'm sure you understand why this is not going to work the same way as reading the actual public key. Not only it needs a network, but it also is susceptible to stealing the values from the database by just generating the (short) unique keys.

I just made a short (2048 bit) key pair, and made the public key into a QR Code (as ascii armoured text, so it could have been more dense in straight binary) https://flic.kr/p/2cYCwfG I could only get it into a 141x141 by dropping error correction right down to 7%, but under ideal conditions (from my monitor to an iPhone) it reads reliably, as shown. I tried a 4096 bit key, but I couldn't (as text) get it into even a…

RSA keys are significantly larger than elliptic curve keys, so for something like putting a pubkey in a QR code, you're much better off going with a 256 bit elliptic curve key than any other hacks to try shave bytes off encoding RSA keys.
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