Rich QR code with three-layer information using visual secret sharing scheme

Owing to efficient machine recognition, QR codes have been widely used in many aspects such as information management, electronic identity and mobile payment. Any QR code reader has access to the message contained in a QR code; therefore, in formation security becomes a major challenge to QR codes for private use. Moreover, human vision is hard to distinguish a QR code from others because its appearance looks randomly. In this paper, we propose a visual secret sharing scheme to achieve a rich QR code with three-layer information storage. In the three layers, the first one and the second one are respectively recognizable by human vision and QR code readers, while the third layer is designed for storing private data. Additionally, we also highlight the low computational complexity of secret extraction from the rich QR code.