Exploiting QR code error correction for digital image watermarking

The growing use of online digital media has made the task of protecting copyright and intellectual property increasingly more challenging. Data hiding techniques, such as digital watermarking, can be used to embed data within a signal for various purposes, e.g., for digital rights management. To achieve this, there are a number of desirable properties for digital watermarking, namely, impercepti-bility, capacity, robustness and security. The research presented in this paper investigates a QR code based watermarking technique for digital images. The utilization of QR codes for this purpose has a number of advantages due to the QR code structure’s inherent properties. As such, the aim of this work is to exploit the inbuilt error correction mechanism and to capitalize on the high data capacity of the QR code structure. This paper examines the proposed QR code watermarking technique and demonstrates its robustness and security against common digital image attacks that may be carried out by an adversary on the watermarked image.