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Rich QR code with three-layer information using visual secret sharing scheme

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Abstract

Owing to efficient machine recognition, QR codes have been widely used in many aspects such as information management, electronic identity and mobile payment. Any QR code reader has access to the message contained in a QR code; therefore, in formation security becomes a major challenge to QR codes for private use. Moreover, human vision is hard to distinguish a QR code from others because its appearance looks randomly. In this paper, we propose a visual secret sharing scheme to achieve a rich QR code with three-layer information storage. In the three layers, the first one and the second one are respectively recognizable by human vision and QR code readers, while the third layer is designed for storing private data. Additionally, we also highlight the low computational complexity of secret extraction from the rich QR code.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 61602513) and the Outstanding Youth Foundation of Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute (grant 2016611303).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, China

    Zhengxin Fu, Yuqiao Cheng & Bin Yu

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  1. Zhengxin Fu
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  2. Yuqiao Cheng
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  3. Bin Yu
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Correspondence to Yuqiao Cheng.

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Fu, Z., Cheng, Y. & Yu, B. Rich QR code with three-layer information using visual secret sharing scheme. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 19861–19875 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7333-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7333-x

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