High density two-dimensional color code

Abstract

Two-dimensional barcodes have been a topic of research for several decades. Recently, new requirements have been imposed on 2D-barcode applications, which include the capability of storing information into a small printed area. This particular requirement is specially important for applications that store cryptographic data, which needs be processed off-line. This is the case of barcodes in products like cigarettes and medicines, which store data used for validation and product verification. In this paper, we propose a 2D-colored barcode: The High Density Two-Dimensional Code (HD2DC), which is currently one of the 2D-barcodes with the highest data density. HD2DC can be generated in 8 different sizes, with 5 or 8 channel colors. To increase robustness, the system uses a Reed-Solomon error correction algorithm with 3 different levels, providing between 10% and 30% of error correction capability. We tested the HD2DC simulating two scenarios: a print-scan channel and a lossy compression stage. Results show that the proposed color barcode, besides being able to store a high density of data, is very robust to channel and compression degradations.