Protection and Hiding Algorithm of QR Code Based on Multi-channel Visual Masking

Quick Response (QR) Code is extensively used due to its advantages in fast readability as well as large capacity. However, when using QR codes, users may suffer from loss of private information because of peeping and scanning by unauthorized attackers. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to hide and protect the QR code based on multichannel visual masking. With our algorithm, the appearance of the QR code is dramatically changed while it maintains the original secret information. Unauthorized users can not extract any information from the protected QR code with the standard QR code reader. For authorized users, we design a truth table based decoder that works with the standard QR code reader. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the robustness and effectiveness of our method. The codes of this paper are published at https://github.com/JiaheZhang/Protection- QR-Code-MVM.