Forgery-Resistant Document Authentication Using (2,2) Visual Cryptography with Dual-Layer QR Code and Mobile Verification

In today's era of widespread document forgery and identity fraud, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of printed and digital documents has become a major concern.This paper explores an innovative approach for document authentication that combines (2,2) visual cryptography (VC), dual-layer QR code encoding, and mobile-based verification mechanisms.VC ensures that sensitive visual information like seals or signatures is split into two shares, one printed on the document and the other encoded in the QR code.The QR code adopts a dual-layer structure that encodes not only the visual share but also auxiliary security metadata such as hashes, timestamps, or biometric hashes to strengthen forgery detection.A mobile device is used to scan the QR code, retrieve the encoded share and metadata, and reconstruct the original image by overlaying it with the printed share.This enables real-time, tamper-evident verification of documents without the need for complex infrastructure.The study reviews the related literature, presents a proposed methodology, and compares existing visual cryptography-based document security systems, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and suitability for real-world applications.