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A new two-level QR code with visual cryptography scheme

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Abstract

The Quick Response (QR) code is designed for information storage recognizable by machine vision. With the popularity of QR code applications, the security of QR codes becomes hot issues concerned by many scholars. In this paper, a novel QR code with two-level information storage is designed to protect private messages. In the meantime, the public level can be directly decoded by any standard QR reader. In contrast to other studies, the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced by combining with the theory of visual cryptography scheme (VCS). In addition, an important characteristic of the QR code, error correction capability, is preserved in this paper, guaranteeing the robustness to QR code damage. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed scheme is both feasible and reasonably secure, further enriching the application fields and outperforming the previous schemes significantly.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.61602513 and the Outstanding Youth Foundation of Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute under Grant No.2016611303.

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

    Yuqiao Cheng, Zhengxin Fu, Bin Yu & Gang Shen

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

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Cheng, Y., Fu, Z., Yu, B. et al. A new two-level QR code with visual cryptography scheme. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 20629–20649 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5465-4

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