Secure Data Exchange and Information Hiding through Color QR Code Technology

QR code is known for rapid and high-capacity information transmission. Being easy to generate and widely used, it’s ideal for hiding information. This paper proposes a color QR code-based information hiding scheme to boost payload and security. It divides secret information into text and image, encodes text as QR code, and processes the image as a binary one. It utilizes QR code's error correction and human visual system's feature extraction ability for robustness. It does mask operation to embed extra image data. It employs different keys with logistic chaos systems for encryption and decryption. It designs a color mapping rule to embed all information types in one QR code, increasing storage capacity. Experiments show it quadruples payload while enhancing security and robustness.