I'm trying to find a secret message, a string, in a 256x256 png image. It's supposed to have "used an old school trick to hide the data", and apparently that method is mentioned in the steganography Wikipedia article.
I tried what appeared to me as most oldschool an straightforward first: LSB steganography. But no luck. I know the first and last characters of the string ("F" and "}"), and I thought they may have mixed the common lsb method up a bit, so I inspected the very first pixels and the very last pixels of the picture myself. However, no apparent combination (like only red values of each pixel) would allow for the correct character. Hence I'm pretty positive it's not using lsb.
In a second, rather desperate try I saw that Wikipedia talks about stripping the most significant six bits, leaving only the least significant two, and then normalizing the picture. I wrote a little script to do this, but no luck here either.
I also looked at the metadata with identify -verbose image.png. Nothing. The file ends as it should after the IEND chunk, so nothing hidden beyond that either.
I'm running out of ideas, so here my question:
Any hints what might classify as old school trick, that I haven't already tried? I'm sure I missed something obvious. This exercise came with a few others, and they all looked harder at first glance than they really were.
Thanks a lot. :)
It turned out that there was a chunk in the middle of the picture with a long text, which contained the wanted string, hidden in the least bits of the blue values only, in least bit first order. Somehow I missed that combination in my preliminary tests. So there you go. :)
To anybody having a similar problem: I find it's best to write a script to test all more commonsense variations (like only single colors, vertical, least-bit or greatest-bit first, etc.) in one large run. It's too easy to miss a simple one otherwise and get hopelessly stuck in crazy complicated theories.
Related
I am working on developing a shape descriptor module for crack clustering of binary cracks. Long story short, I have engineered several features. To arrange my feature vector for images that contain several cracks, as the biggest crack normally (not always) defines the crack type, I weigh the features based on the area each crack occupies (the number of pixels) and then, take the average.
Take as an example the below image:
enter image description here
The horizontal one decides that this crack image is a transverse crack and at the same time, I can't ignore the one in the corner.
My question is that what is the best way to deal with this? I feel like my feature vector should be multi-dimensional to be able to cover the multi-crack ones, but I haven't seen a problem like this.
Note 1: refining the images and removing the small ones is not an option cuz in some other types, their presence tells a different story. Example:
enter image description here
Here the little ones define that this crack is a meandering one.
Note 2: From an engineering point of view, the simpler the better.
Note 3: The number of cracks in one image can go up to 18, and at the same time, the majority of my data contain one crack.
I am coding a spell-casting system where you draw a symbol with your wand (mouse), and it can recognize said symbol.
There are two methods I believe might work; neural networking and an "invisible grid system"
The problem with the neural networking system is that It would be (likely) suboptimal in Roblox Luau, and not be able to match the performance nor speed I wish for. (Although, I may just be lacking in neural networking knowledge. Please let me know whether I should continue to try implementing it this way)
For the invisible grid system, I thought of converting the drawing into 1s and 0s (1 = drawn, 0 = blank), then seeing if it is similar to one of the symbols. I create the symbols by making a dictionary like:
local Symbol = { -- "Answer Key" shape, looks like a tilted square
00100,
01010,
10001,
01010,
00100,
}
The problem is that user error will likely cause it to be inaccurate, like this "spell"'s blue boxes, showing user error/inaccuracy. I'm also sure that if I have multiple Symbols, comparing every value in every symbol will surely not be quick.
Do you know an algorithm that could help me do this? Or just some alternative way of doing this I am missing? Thank you for reading my post.
I'm sorry if the format on this is incorrect, this is my first stack-overflow post. I will gladly delete this post if it doesn't abide to one of the rules. ( Let me know if there are any tags I should add )
One possible approach to solving this problem is to use a template matching algorithm. In this approach, you would create a "template" for each symbol that you want to recognize, which would be a grid of 1s and 0s similar to what you described in your question. Then, when the user draws a symbol, you would convert their drawing into a grid of 1s and 0s in the same way.
Next, you would compare the user's drawing to each of the templates using a similarity metric, such as the sum of absolute differences (SAD) or normalized cross-correlation (NCC). The template with the lowest SAD or highest NCC value would be considered the "best match" for the user's drawing, and therefore the recognized symbol.
There are a few advantages to using this approach:
It is relatively simple to implement, compared to a neural network.
It is fast, since you only need to compare the user's drawing to a small number of templates.
It can tolerate some user error, since the templates can be designed to be tolerant of slight variations in the user's drawing.
There are also some potential disadvantages to consider:
It may not be as accurate as a neural network, especially for complex or highly variable symbols.
The templates must be carefully designed to be representative of the expected variations in the user's drawings, which can be time-consuming.
Overall, whether this approach is suitable for your use case will depend on the specific requirements of your spell-casting system, including the number and complexity of the symbols you want to recognize, the accuracy and speed you need, and the resources (e.g. time, compute power) that are available to you.
I have written matlab codes for two different block matching algorithms, extensive search and three step search, but i am not sure how i can check whether i am getting the correct results. Is there any standard way to check these or any standard code which i can run and compare my result with.I read somewhere that JM software can be used but i didnt find any way to use it.
You can always use the results produced by your algorithms to create the next frame of video and then analyze its quality by either visually inspecting it (which is rather subjective, and we like to deal in numbers) or calculating the mean square error between the produced image and the one you're trying to estimate. Mean square error of the exhaustive (extensive) search should be lower than the one three-step gives you.
Well, did you try to plot it? I mean,after the block-matching you have a new image, right?.
A way to know if you result if true or not is to check the sum of the difference of 2 frames.
A - pre_frame
B - post_frame
C - Compensated frame
If abs(abs(A-B)) is lower than abs(abs(A-C))) that mean it could be true.
Next time, try to specify your algoritm. Also, put your code here to help you more.
I work at a nanotech lab where I do silicon wafer dicing. (The wafer saw cuts only parallel lines) We are, of course, trying to maximize the yield of the die we cut. All the of die will be equal size, either rectangular or square, and the die are all cut from a circular wafer. Essentially, I am trying to pack maximum rectangles into a circle.
I have only a pretty basic understanding of MATLAB and an intermediate understanding of calculus. Is there any (relatively) simple way to do this, or am I way over my head?
Go from here, and good luck:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
and get here:
http://www-sop.inria.fr/mascotte/WorkshopScheduling/2Dpacking.pdf
At least you'll have some idea what are you tackling here.
I was fascinated to read your question because I did a project on this for my training as a Mathematics Teacher. I'm also quite pleased to know that it's thought to be an NP-problem, because my project was leading me to the same conclusion.
By use of basic calculus, I calculated the first few 'generations' of rectangles of maximum size, but it gets complex quite quickly.
You can read my project here:
Beckett, R. Parcels of Pi: A curve-packing problem. Bath Spa MEC. 2009.
Pages 1 - 15
Pages 16 - 30
I hope that some of my findings are useful to you or at least interesting. I thought that the application of this idea would most likely be in computer nano technology.
Kind regards.
Packing arbitrary rectangles into a circle to meet a space efficiency objective is a non-convex (NP-Hard) optimization in general. This means there will be no elegant or simple solution that will solve this problem optimally. The solution methods are all going to depend on any specific domain knowledge you can use to prune the search tree or develop heuristics. If you have no experience in this type of problem you should probably consult with an expert.
doesn't this resemble the Gauss's Circle Problem? See
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GausssCircleProblem.html
or, this can be seen as a "packaging problem"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problem#Squares_in_circle
I am trying to use tesseract-2.04 in my iPhone application and just want to detect the numbers. What I am doing here is first I am cross compiling tesseract to generate lib file using this post http://robertcarlsen.net/2009/07/15/cross-compiling-for-iphone-dev-884 and then using the the demo application at http://robertcarlsen.net/2010/01/12/ocr-for-iphone-source-1080 , but the results far away than realistic.
I am not able to resolve the issue or how to train tesseract so that it comes closure for practical usage.
Please help.
Thanks,
Madhup
I get quite good results setting
TessBaseAPI::SetVariable("tessedit_char_whitelist", "0123456789");
while gently urging the user to let the numbers fit in a certain box. This makes locating the numbers easier for me, and ensures the user keeps the image steady and at a reasonable distance leading to a sharper image.
I have thought about altering valid_word() in tesseract-2.04/dict/permute.cpp, but there seems to be no need for that.
The next step will be to hardcode a minimum/maximum char size so recognition time can become way less than the 500 ms it is now. Then the next step will be to add some code that keeps track of results in time, so that reading 5 90% of the time and 8 only 10% will lead the code to remember the 5.
It all depends on the use case you have. I'm lucky in the sense that I'm allowed to just show a 200x50 box which will contain the number.