A QR code-based user-friendly visual cryptography scheme https://share.newsbreak.com/11qy8fik Download PDFDownload PDF - Article - Open Access - Published: 10 May 2022 A QR code-based user-friendly visual cryptography scheme - Lijing Ren & - Denghui Zhang Scientific Reports volume 12, Article number: 7667 (2022) Cite this article - Metricsdetails Abstract Benefiting from the development of the Internet and smart devices, it is now convenient to transmit images anywhere and anytime, which poses a new challenge for image security. The Visual Cryptography Scheme (VCS) is a secret sharing method for protecting an image without a key, the merit of VCS is the human visual system (HVS) can restore the secret image by simply superimposing qualified shares, without any computation. To eliminate noise-like shares in traditional VCS, this paper presents a novel QR code-based expansion-free and meaningful visual cryptography scheme (QEVCS), which generates visually appealing QR codes for transmitting meaningful shares. When distributing on public networks, this scheme does not attract the attention of potential attackers. By limiting the gray-level of a halftoned image, QEVCS both keep the computation-free of visual cryptography and the size of recovery image same as the secret images. The experimental results show the effectiveness of QEVCS when preserving the privacy of images. Introduction In recent years, the rapid development of smart devices and 5G technologies have had a great impact on all walks of life, now people are enjoying conveniences brought by Internet services. As an important information carrier, digital images are widely used in fields including