Exploiting QR Code Error Correction
for Digital Image Watermarking


Yang-Wai Chow, Willy Susilo+, Joonsang Baek, Jongkil Kim, and Wei Zong

 

Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology, School of Computing and Information Technology

University of Wollongong, Australia

{caseyc, wsusilo, baek, jongkil, wzong}@uow.edu.au

 

Abstract

The growing use of online digital media has made the task of protecting copyright and intellectual property increasingly more challenging. Data hiding techniques, such as digital watermarking, can be used to embed data within a signal for various purposes, e.g., for digital rights management. To achieve this, there are a number of desirable properties for digital watermarking, namely, imperceptibility, capacity, robustness and security. The research presented in this paper investigates a QR code based watermarking technique for digital images. The utilization of QR codes for this purpose has a number of advantages due to the QR code structure’s inherent properties. As such, the aim of this work is to exploit the inbuilt error correction mechanism and to capitalize on the high data capacity of the QR code structure. This paper examines the proposed QR code watermarking technique and demonstrates its robustness and security against common digital image attacks that may be carried out by an adversary on the watermarked image.

 

Keywords: Data Hiding, Error Correction, QR Code, Watermarking

 

+: Corresponding author: Willy Susilo
School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia, Tel: +61-2-4221-5535

 

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA), Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 114-140, June 2021 [pdf]

Received: November 3, 2020; Accepted: January 22, 2021; Published: June 30, 2021

DOI: 10.22667/JOWUA.2021.06.30.114