It would be neat to see the same thing, except using two OCR libraries instead of just one, and requiring both libraries to be able to read the message. I imagine the letters would start to look a bit less insane.
Reverse OCR
61–70 of 92 posts
Re: Reverse OCR
#62Not strictly related, but reminded me of the exercise in genetic programming by Roger Alsing: http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut... It's a rather cool attempt to draw the Mona Lisa using random, semi-transparent polygons
I did this recently, the results were surprisingly good! https://github.com/darkFunction/PolygonPainter Edit: Roger Alsing's implementation was a single entity population (mutated then reverted if the mutation was no good). I copied this approach in my first implementation, but found that much better results could be achieved with a breeding population of genes.
Yeah really good results, conceivably useful for compression. It be good to know the vertices count in your final penguin images.
Re: Reverse OCR
#63What (if anything) is this saying about the quality of the OCR process? Especially since none of these seem human readable.
I'm not bothered by it any more than I'm bothered by our brains' propensity for seeing faces where there aren't any.
That's a pretty interesting way of looking at it, machine pareidolia.
Re: Reverse OCR
#64Here's the source code on github: https://github.com/dariusk/reverseocr
Re: Reverse OCR
#65Re: Reverse OCR
#66This could be a cool way to visually "encrypt" messages. They're readable, but only by the correct tool. I wonder how these squiggles might be creatively arranged steganographicly in an image and still be "read" by the OCR tool.
This is a good idea! The problem with these squiggles is that they look abnormal and would draw attention. It would be interesting if these can be tweaked somehow so that they are still bot readable but can also be interpreted as patterns by humans.
...Here's a crazy thought.
Take handwriting, the more illegible the better. Then use a genetic algorithm where the fitness function is trying to find as small a perturbation as possible to the input such that the output is recognized as the letters you want.
Re: Reverse OCR
#67This is similar to the project where images of clouds were fed to face recognition software: http://ssbkyh.com/works/cloud_face/
there's also http://iobound.com/pareidoloop/ , a project that uses a genetic algorithm for breeding (random) polygons into a shape with a face detection algorithm as the fitness function.
That is totally cool. It feels like watching an oil painter slowly work from something very abstract (layers of brushstrokes) to something very recognizable (a human face).
Re: Reverse OCR
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. I never really understood why is it so. Encrypted data must be indistinguishible from random, thus, if you replace any random projection of a file with your data, the result should be completely unrecognizable. It shouldn't really matter if your algorithms are public. Is the problem that it's hard to get random projections from modern data? If so, why n…
People don't typically exchange randomised versions of their data.
I think "random projection", as used by the parent, can be things like "low bits of the pixels in this image". If the color depth provides greater resolution than the sensors, then you can expect to have some random data implicit in the image that it would be possible to change in ways that could be provably undetectable.
A tremendous caveat is that when we find ourselves shipping around lots of meaningless random bits, we often quickly reach for lossy compression that doesn't faithfully reproduce those bits, and that can break the scheme.
Re: Reverse OCR
#69What (if anything) is this saying about the quality of the OCR process? Especially since none of these seem human readable.
Not much, probably. It would be largely wasted effort to tune OCR algorithms to avoid (falsely) recognizing letters in artificially synthetized datasets that don't occur in practice.
Why's it so highly upvoted then? I was expecting something moderately legible.
Re: Reverse OCR
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. Sure, we comp-sci people don't care about that, but spies do. There was that Russian Spy who was transmitting data for years on her Facebook account through steganography pictures on her Facebook account. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419833/russian-spies-us... The FBI didn't know about it until after she was caught. So believe it or not, Steganogr…
Wow, that article is pretty bad.
Yeah... it was...
It was the first link on Google that seemed to mention the FBI / Russian Spy case. So take it as "proof the thing happened", but ignore the article.