DATA ENCRYPTION THROUGH QR CODE AND STEGANOGRAPHY

The art of information hiding has become an important issue in the recent years as security of information has become a big concern in this internet era. Cryptography and Steganography play major role for secured data transfer. Steganography stands for concealed writing; it hides the message inside a cover medium. Cryptography conceals the content of a message by encryption. QR (Quick Response) Codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode text strings. They are able to encode information in both vertical and horizontal direction, thus able to encode more information. In this paper a novel approach is proposed for secret communication by combining the concepts of Steganography and QR codes. The suggested method includes two phases: (i) Encrypting the message by a QR code encoder and thus creating a QR code (ii) Hiding the QR code inside a color image. This hiding process embeds the quantized QR code so that it will not make any visible distortion in the cover image and it introduces very minimum Bit Error Rate (BER). Experimental result shows that the proposed method has high imperceptibility, integrity and security.