A Design of Multi-Purpose Image-Based QR Code

A multi-purpose image-based QR code is designed in this paper. There are four purposes for the generated image-based QR code. In the first purpose, the basic image-based QR code with the look of a host image is with an ingenious layout to be identified easier. In the second one, a saliency region detection method is adopted for enhancing the quality of the image-based QR code. In the third one, the host image is embedded into the image-based QR code for further access to the host image; Finally, the visual cryptography-based watermarking method is applied to the host image embedded image-based QR code. In the case that the specific users need verification from the image-based QR code, the binary verified image can be retrieved when the public share is available. The experimental results demonstrate that the generated image-based QR code not only looked better than some previous works but also had high quality host image embedded and identification ability.