Safeguarding Information in QR Codes Through Steganographic Technique

The act of concealing data within a different message or object in order to avoid detection is referred to as steganography. Steganography can hide various types of digital content such as text, images, audio, and video. Upon arrival, the hidden information is subsequently exposed. Employing a form of steganography called QR Image Steganography, in which a secret message is encoded into a QR code and subsequently hidden within an image to provide effective and efficient security. To safeguard the secret communication, encoding is carried out on the sender's end, and decoding is done on the recipient's end. This paper is focused on the idea that, in order to maintain confidentiality and prevent a third party from spotting the hidden message in the stegano image, the cover image should not be significantly altered when concealing the QR code containing the secret message. Additionally, the PSNR values of the cover picture and the stegano image were used to verify this; they were fairly high, showing that the cover image had slight distortion. In order to determine the pixel value change where the distortion is not apparent, the sample histograms of the cover and stegano picture were also plotted.