A Novel Visual Secret Sharing Scheme Based on QR Codes

Abstract

In this paper, a novel visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme using QR codes is investigated. The proposed visual secret sharing scheme based on QR codes(VSSQR) can visually reveal secret image by stacking sufficient (shadow images) shares as well as scan the QR code by a QR code reader. Our VSSQR exploits the error correction mechanism in the QR code structure, to embed the bits corresponding to shares generated by VSS from a secret bit into the same locations of QR codes in the processing of encoding QR. Each output share is a valid QR code, which may reduce the likelihood of attracting the attention of potential attackers. The secret image can be recovered by stacking sufficient QR code shares based on the human visual system without any computation. In addition, it can assist alignment for VSS recovery. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our scheme.