Research On Secret Sharing Technology Based On Aesthetic QR Code

Recent years,with the rapid development of mobile Internet and the popularity of smart mobile terminals like mobile phones, QR code (quick response code) has quickly becomes one popular way of information communication. People can scan the QR code with their phones to access the Internet, shopping,making friends or online payment. It brings great convenience to people’s daily life. But the traditional QR code does not take the visual information into account. The monotonous appearance of QR code is black and white "noise-like",from which users can’t get any useful information. Therefore, to design one kind of visual appearance beautified QR code can make up for the inadequacy of traditional barcode appearance, which has great practical significance.The rapid development of network communication also brings us the data security problem. Visual cryptography is one kind of secret sharing technology. It has simple decryption process, strong concealment, high security and many other advantages. Visual cryptography has a broad prospect in digital protection of intellectual property rights,anti-counterfeiting, covert communications etc. But there still exists some problems that limited the development of visual cryptography. In traditional visual cryptography, the share images are meaningless images constituted by black and white randomly distributed points. It is easy to arouse the doubt of initiative attacker and may lead to tampering or damaging with the share images, so the hidden secret information could not be restored. Meaningless share image, on the other hand, has the risk of being confused. We may unable to discern which share image belongs to which participant.In this paper, we proposed a visual cryptography QR code sharing scheme. By embedding the QR code, the meaningless share images generated by visual cryptography can carry more information. Meanwhile, it does not affect the restoration of the secret image. The information embedded in QR codes can be obtained by scanning the share or restored secret images, which overcomes the shortcomings of visual cryptography and expands its application scope. We also proposed a QR code beautification algorithm based on the padding code words replacement technology. And by using multistage embedding optimization algorithm the visual quality of QR code can be further improved. The proposed algorithm does not need long time operation. It’s free from the error correction ability of QR codes, which improved the decoding rate of QR code in a complex environment. We also applied the QR visual optimization algorithm to the visual cryptography QR code sharing scheme to further improve the clarity of the restored secret image under the precondition of not affecting the security of visual cryptography.