Robust Visual Secret Sharing Scheme Applying to QR Code

Jinrui Chen,Xuehu Yan,Tianqi Lu,Feng Liu,Longdan Tan,Lintao Liu,Yuliang Lu,Kesheng Liu

doi:10.1155/2018/4036815

Jinrui Chen, Xuehu Yan + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/4036815

Copy DOI

Abstract

Different color patterns of quick response (QR) codes, such as RGB, grayscale, and binary QR codes, are widely used in applications. In this paper, we propose a novel XOR-based visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme using grayscale QR codes as cover images and binary QR code as secret image. First, all the codewords of the secret QR code image are encoded into n temporary binary QR code images, which are substituted for the second significant bit planes of the grayscale QR code cover images to generate n shares. Each share is a grayscale QR code image, which can be decoded by a standard QR code decoder, so that it may not attract the attention of potential attackers when distributed in the public channel. The secret image can be recovered by XORing the codewords regions of QR codes which are extracted from the second significant bit planes of the grayscale shares. More importantly, the proposed scheme is robust to JPEG compression, addition of different noises, rotation, resizing, and cropping, which is useful in practice. The effectiveness and robustness of our scheme are shown by the experimental results. The application of QR code is suitable for wireless multimedia data security.

Highlights

Quick response(QR) code is a kind of two-dimensional matrix codes used widely in all walks of life recently, for the advantages of its speed reading, error correction capability, multiple-format data representing, high capacity compared to one-dimensional codes, and so on
This paper proposed a novel robust visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme applying to quick response (QR) code
QR code image are split into n temporary binary QR codes randomly with the theory of XOR-based VSS, so shares with high image quality and high imperceptibility can be achieved in the end

Summary

Introduction

Quick response(QR) code is a kind of two-dimensional matrix codes used widely in all walks of life recently, for the advantages of its speed reading, error correction capability, multiple-format data representing, high capacity compared to one-dimensional codes, and so on. Chow et al [11] proposed a (n, n) threshold scheme for cases that n is no less than 3, in which the secret image and cover images are all binary QR codes with the same version and the same level of error correction. Wan et al [10] proposed a scheme that deeply integrated the QR code error correction mechanism with the theory of VSS and the region shared with the secret image is continuous. We propose a novel robust secret sharing scheme for (n, n) threshold that n is not less than 2 This scheme integrates the QR code error correction mechanism with the theory of XVSS, and all the QR codes are with the same version and level of error correction.

Preliminaries

Proposed Robust VSS Appling to QR Codes

Experiments and Comparisons

Conclusion