Rich QR Codes with Three-Layer Information Using Hamming Code

Abstract

As a kind of machine readable symbol, the Quick Response (QR) code is widely used in all walks of life due to its large information capacity, strong error correction ability and fast read speed. However, the public encoding of the QR code makes its contents unsafe. In this paper, we introduce a novel rich QR code with three-layer information that utilizes the characteristics of the Hamming code and the error correction mechanism of the QR code to protect the secret information. The first layer information, that is, the public information, can be decoded by any standard QR reader. The XOR operation is performed on all shares to obtain the second layer information. Finally, the pixels of the same position in all shares are taken as a set of Hamming codes, respectively, and the third layer information is extracted by a matrix multiplication operation. Compared to other related schemes, the proposed scheme has the advantage of high information embedding efficiency and strong robustness against common image post-processing attacks.