Fujitsu promotes sublimage technology

Fujitsu is promoting a technology which can encode data into a picture which is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera.

The technology takes advantage of fact that the human eye does not easily see the colour yellow. The yellow hue in a magazine picture, for example, can be skewed to create a pattern or code.

Although the pattern will be invisible to the human eye, it will be picked up easily with a camera phone.

The encoded data could be a website link which an internet enabled phone could use to connect to the web. A small java application has to be downloaded to the phone to enable it to decode the information. A phone number or message could also be encoded.

The technique can currently store only 12 bytes of information, the equivalent amount of data in a barcode, but this will rise to 24 bytes shortly.

The technology has been put into commercial use for the first time. A Japanese Music Club has embedded codes into the flyers it sends to subscribers.