MIC Reveal

Tooling to reveal printer Machine Identification Code (MIC) yellow dots in scanned images.

This project was initially created for a Root-Me steganography challenge and is now structured as a reusable mini CLI tool.

What Is MIC?

The Machine Identification Code (MIC) is a pattern of tiny yellow dots that some color laser printers add to printed pages. These dots can encode metadata such as printer serial information and print timestamp.

Reference: Wikipedia - Machine Identification Code

Features

• colored mode: draws bounding boxes around detected yellow dots.
• highlight mode: keeps only detected yellow areas and darkens everything else.
• Configurable HSV thresholds for tuning detection.
• Backward-compatible wrappers for legacy scripts.

Project Structure

• mic_reveal.py: shared logic + unified CLI.
• get_mic_colored.py: compatibility wrapper (colored mode).
• get_mic_highlight.py: compatibility wrapper (highlight mode).

Installation

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Usage

Unified CLI (recommended)

mic-reveal colored input.png output_colored.png
mic-reveal highlight input.png output_highlight.png

Optional threshold tuning

mic-reveal colored input.png output.png --lower-hsv 20,100,100 --upper-hsv 40,255,255

Legacy scripts (still supported)

python get_mic_colored.py input.png output_colored.png
python get_mic_highlight.py input.png output_highlight.png

Example Input with the colored feature

Output