Reversible Hiding with Quick Response Code - A Responsible Security

Abstract

In this paper, Reversible data hiding using difference statistics technique incorporating QR codes was proposed. Here, Quick Response (QR) codes were employed as an additional feature and were hidden in the corners of the original image to direct to the hyperlink after authentication and then embedding the secret data bits was carried out. At the receiver side, when the QR codes were scanned by the user, the link to the webpage was accessed, and then the original image and the secret data bits were recovered by using the proposed reversible data hiding scheme. In the proposed scheme, the pixels of the cover image were scanned in row-major order fashion, and the differences between the adjacent pixels were computed, keeping the first pixel unaltered to maintain the size of the host and the difference image same. Now, the histogram was shifted towards the right or left to reduce the redundancy and then to embed the secret data bits were done. Due to the similarity exists between the pixel values, the difference between the host and the secret image reconstructs the marked image. The proposed scheme was carried out using MATLAB 2013. PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and payload have been computed for various test images to validate the proposed scheme and found to be better than the available literature.