Research On Reversible Data Hiding Combined With QR Code Applications

Reversible data hiding and QR Code are the hot topic in recent years. Reversible data hiding is widely used in copyright protection, authentication and secret communication and so on. And QR Code is widely used in all aspects of daily life. It has a good prospect combining these two techniques after studying and analyzing them in detail. The main contributions and innovations are as follows:At the beginning of this thesis, the research background and significance are introduced; the basic concepts, characteristics and classification of information hiding and two-dimensional code technology are summarized. Then, reversible data hiding and QR Code are introduced in detail. On the basis of analysis of these technologies, the following algorithms and schemes are proposed. Focusing on the reason for the reversibility of the reversible data hiding, a reversible data hiding method based on histogram shifting by pixel pair’s average predictions (PPAP) is proposed. It will ensure reversibility to select the average of two adjacent pixels as a constant feature. The algorithm not only improves the embedding capacity but also ensure a good image quality. Experimental result indicates the good performance of PPAP algorithm. Meanwhile, a new idea is proposed to improve the transmitting security of auxiliary information. The auxiliary information is embedded into QR code image as secret information. Then, the QR code image covers the selected location of cover image as visible watermark.A scheme to authenticate the source of QR code coding information is proposed aimed at the reliability of coding information source. First, according to the inherent characteristics of QR code image, a partition-based (PB) reversible data hiding algorithm is proposed. In PB algorithm, the QR code image is divided into two type blocks:zero blocks and non-zero blocks, and secret information are embedded according to embedding rules. Then, combining with the technology of Certificate Authority and digital signature, sign the content of QR code. The signature is embedded into QR code image with PB algorithm. The client extracts signature and transmits it to the Certificate Authority to ensure the reliability of coding information source. The experimental result indicates that PB algorithm has good performance and adaptability.