Puzzle challenge 3

A while ago I was working through the hackthissite.org challenges. One of the challenge categories is "Steganography", which revolves around hiding secrets in images. As I would attempt these challenges, I kept looking for the solution in places that ended up to be irrelevant. After thinking about it for a little time I ended up thinking you certainly could hide a secret of some sort where I was looking, and decided to write my own challenge along the same lines.

The image I produced is below. The challenge is simply to find the password in it. There is no validation form to check your answer but the answer can be found in this link. I expect the jump to make is too large without a hint, so there is a clue provided here.

The Challenge Image

In keeping with the other puzzles I've put on this site I'm including the code I used to produce the puzzle. This isn't particularly cleaned, and includes some notes to myself on figuring out how to implement what I wanted. Those are the files analysis.py, decoder.py, encoder.py, investigation.vsh, and extracting-letters.vsh. While I used the image base_image.png (which I made in gimp) so I didn't have to generate the image from scratch.