Helvetica & Other Typefaces Can Now Be Used To Encrypt Secret Messages
Video screenshot via Chang Xiao
Do you recall those invisible ink pens that let you write secret notes only visible under black light? This neat experiment is kind of like those, but for designers. It’ll also make you feel like a creative by day and a spy by night.
A team of researchers at Columbia University, led by Changxi Zheng, have found a way to embed secret messages in typefaces by making negligible tweaks to their designs that are almost indistinguishable to the human eye.
Video screenshot via Chang Xiao
Titled ‘FontCode’, the project uses an AI tool that thickens the stem of the letter ‘b’, or makes the bowls of the letter ‘p’ rounder. Each letter can hold 52 mild variations of starkly different meanings that the computer has been trained with a “code book” to discern.
“We devise an algorithm to choose unobtrusive yet machine-recognizable glyph perturbations,” the group writes in a paper.
“…We also present a glyph recognition method that recovers the embedded information from an encoded document stored as a vector graphic or pixel image, or even on a printed paper.”
Zheng hopes the method will be adopted by others and turned into products.
Most notably, the technology can be extremely advantageous for security purposes. Co.Design suggests that it might be able to store authentication codes in text documents that let you know if the files have been doctored by someone else.
It can also double as an invisible “QR code” of sorts that unlocks useful information when you point at a poster or photo with your phone. This is great news for designers, as Zheng explains that the tool would be able to serve a purpose without sacrificing visual beauty.
“[W]e don’t need to put the QR code patterns. That’s a distraction.”
The team is also planning to extend the technique to 3D and physical objects and have them embed secret messages.
Video screenshot by Chang Xiao via GIPHY
Video screenshot by Chang Xiao via GIPHY
[via Co.Design, video and screenshots via Chang Xiao]
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