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A fake threshold visual cryptography of QR code

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Abstract

Visual cryptography (VC) is a technique that can encrypt images without complicated calculation. As the image, the quick response (QR) code can also be encrypted by VC to ensure its safe transmission on the network. In recent years, VC has developed rapidly. The original VC has been developed into many forms, such as (n, n)-VC, (k, n)-VC. These new VC schemes can be applied to the QR code to make it more secure in the network. This paper proposes a new VC scheme for the QR code by using the mechanism of the error correction code (ECC). ECC is used to control the number of shares to recover whether the secret QR code can be decoded correctly. The codewords in the same block of the QR code are evenly distributed to each share. If the number of shares is less than the threshold, the restored QR code will not be decoded correctly. The number of wrong codewords exceeds its error correction capability. The theoretical analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure when the standard decoder is used. The experimental results also prove the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

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Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61872085), the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (2018J01638) and the Fujian Provincial Department of Science and Technology (2018Y3001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266590, China

    Tao Liu, Hong-Mei Yang, Shu-Chuan Chu & Jeng-Shyang Pan

  2. College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266590, China

    Bin Yan

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  1. Tao Liu
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  2. Bin Yan
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  3. Hong-Mei Yang
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  4. Shu-Chuan Chu
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  5. Jeng-Shyang Pan
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Correspondence to Jeng-Shyang Pan.

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Liu, T., Yan, B., Yang, HM. et al. A fake threshold visual cryptography of QR code. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 39635–39653 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13011-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13011-x

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