Design of image barcodes for future mobile advertising

Mobile advertising refers to communication in which mobile phones are used as a medium to efficiently attract potential customers. Among mobile advertising applications, barcodes are becoming a very powerful mobile commerce tool. By capturing a barcode with a camera scanner, people can easily access a wealth of information online. Barcodes have thus converted hard copies of newspapers, wallpapers, and magazines into crucial platforms for mobile commerce. However, although barcodes are frequently used for embedding information in printed matter, they have unsightly overt patterns. Concealing data in visually meaningful image barcodes (such as trademarks) instead of using extra barcode areas has the advantage of increasing the added value of using conventional barcode patterns, and thus, it is desirable for future mobile advertising. This paper presents a novel data-hiding method for halftone images. Without obeying the barcode format, we treat the image itself as an entire carrier to embed data. Hence, data-hiding and halftoning algorithms are integrated into our method to against the extreme bi-level quantization in the printing process.