Use Multiplexing to Increase Information in QR Code

Sartid Vongpradhip
Digital System Engineering Laboratory, Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand vsartid@chula.ac.th Abstract In this paper a novel approach to multiplex data in
QR Code is presented. This technique can increase the amount of data, as the original information, in QR Code as well as keeping secret information. The original data for encoding is divided into smaller parts, each part will form QR Code pattern in its standard form. Each pattern is encoded or multiplexed and represented each module in QR Code with black and white special symbols. At the receiving end, this QR Code with special symbols (that was multiplexed) is decoded to give back the number of QR Code patterns that was multiplexed. These QR Code pattern can be read by the general QR Code reader and the data can be concatenated back to form its original information. Index TermsQR Code, capacity improvement, data hiding, data security.

I. INTRODUCTION QR Code is a type of 2-dimensional bar code in the form of Matrix Code developed by Denso Wave[1]. QR Code is composed of black and white modules which became wildly known and wildly used because of their reading speed, accuracy and functionality characteristic. This bar code contains information both in the vertical and horizontal direction. The maximum data capacity, within version 40 of the QR Code, is 7,089 numeric characters or 4,296 alphanumeric characters. There have been many researches in the field of QR Code such as using mobile phone to recognize the QR Code [2]. A new method of QR Code accumulation encoding in mobile education was done by [3], a technique to remove scratches from QR Code [4] and indentifying QR Code by [5]. QR Code using invisible watermarking in frequency domain was done by [6]. Data hiding method for QR code based on DCT, DFT and DWT were compared by [7],[8] and [9]. Even though QR Code can hold information more than other bar codes, there is still a room for improving capacity in the QR Code. A High Capacity Colored Two Dimensional (HCC2D) code which is a 2D code aims at increasing space available for data was done by [10]. Five different RGB colors (red, green, blue, black and white) were used to enable twice as much information storage capacity to the QR Code [11]. Using many colors to the code will increase the capacity but

may have more problems with the threshold due to the intensity of light compared with the black and white image. As the QR Code, has fixed data length within the same version and the same error correcting level. It will be useful to increase more data into QR Code within the same version and the same error correcting level. That is if the maximum number of characters to be included in version 6 with data recovery rate at level L is 195 Alphanumeric [12] as shown in Table I. To increase the number of characters more than the maximum limit, the user has to go for a higher version of QR Code. In this paper a novel approach to increase data in QR Code, while remaining in the same version and recovery rate, is proposed. Section II shows QR Code, Special Symbols used and an overview of this method. Section III shows the experiment where the information was divided into 3 parts. II. METHODOLOGY The original information is divided, to form a string of characters, into n parts, where n is the number of QR Code pattern that can be formed by a string of characters in each part as shown in Table II. The data in each part will form ordinary QR Code corresponding to that part of data. The module correspond to the same position in each QR Code, except for the part of the Finder Pattern and Timing Pattern are multiplexed and using a special black and white symbol to represent them. The symbols for representing the modules, after multiplexing, are shown in Table III. After that when this QR Code with special symbols was scanned or read by optical device such as a scanner or a camera phone, the picture image can be analyzed. Each special symbol is recognized and the demultiplexing process decode the information from single QR Code with special symbols and split the data back to their QR Code pattern where these QR Code pattern can be read by ordinary QR Code reader. The data in each QR Code pattern were recognized and concatenated back to form its original information. The Algorithm for Multiplexing and Demutiplexing is shown in Figure 2. Figure 3 shows the overview of Mutiplexing and Demultiplexing method used in the experiment. Figure 4 shows the experiment with 8 special symbols.

QR Code QR Code is a matrix symbol consists of arrays of nominally square modules arranged in an overall square pattern. The format of QR Code includes unique Finder Pattern (Position Detection Patterns) located at three corners of the symbol and can be used to locate the positioning of the symbol, size and inclination. A wide range of sizes of symbol is provided together with four levels of error correction. In the experiment the Finder Pattern and the Timing Pattern in the QR Code with special symbol are kept the same as in the original QR Code as they were used in positioning and for the spacing distance for the modules in horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. The basic characteristic of QR Code [1], [6] is explained as follows: 1. Encodable character set The experiment is focused on two types of data as follows: 1. Numeric data that is digits from 0 to 9. 2. Alphanumeric data that is digits from 0 to 9, upper and lower case letters are from A to Z, and ten other characters are space , $ % * + - . / : 2. Representation of data A dark module represents a binary one and a light module represents a binary zero. 3. Symbol size (not including quiet zone): The number of modules is 21x21 modules to 177x177 modules starting from version 1 to version 40, increasing in steps of 4 modules per side for each increasing version. 4. Data characters per symbol

The lowest version is version 1 and the largest version is version 40, where input data capacity in some of the versions are summarized in Table I. [12]
TABLE I. INPUT DATA CAPACITY FOR QR CODE 2005 Version Error Correction level L M H Q L M H Q L M H Q L M H Q L M H Q

Data Capacity Numeric Alphanumeric

41 34 27 17 255 202 144 106 322 255 178 139 370 293 207 154 7089 5596 3993 3057 25 20 16 10 154 122 87 64 195 154 108 84 224 178 125 93 4296 3391 2420 1852

Kanji
10 8 7 4 65 52 37 27 82 65 45 36 95 75 53 39 1817 1435 1024 784

40

5. Selectable error correction: There are four levels (L, M, Q and H) of error correction using Reed-Solomon technique allowing recovery of the symbol codewords: 1. Error correcting level L is 7% 2. Error correcting level M is 15% 3. Error correcting level Q is 25% 4. Error correcting level H is 30%

Fig. 1 Symbol Structure of QR Code

Special Symbols The number of special symbols used is 2n where n is the number of patterns in the QR Code as shown in Table II.
TABLE II. NO. OF SPECIAL SYMBOLS & NO. OF PATTERN No. of QR Code patterns 1 2 3 4 5 No. of Special symbols (2n) 2 4 8 16 32

The number of patterns 3 was chosen in this paper as an example, therefore there would be 8 special symbols needed to implement this technique. Actually any characters on the keyboard or any special character patterns or any special symbols can be used. In this paper the special symbols were chosen from the experiments done earlier in our Digital System Engineering Laboratory and were published in [13] that are the symbols of \ / v ^ > < and where the representation are shown in the Table III.
TABLE III. SPECIAL SYMBOLS USE FOR EACH PATTERN Module in each pattern 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Symbols

\ /
v ^ > <

0 represents black module and 1 represents white module

Fig. 2 Algorithm for Multiplexing and Demultiplexing

Fig. 3 Overview of multiplexing and demultiplexing method

The corresponding module in the same position of each pattern of QR Code is considered. If the color in the same position of each QR Code is black, black, black (0 0 0) the symbol \ is used in the QR Code with special symbols. Some part of QR code that is not used for data and error correction e.g. Finder Pattern and Timing Pattern were kept the same and used for alignment as well as for separating each special symbols for later recognition. III. EXPERIMENT The experiment was done with an example which had Sartid Vongpradhip Chulalongkorn U. as the original information. This information is devided into 3 parts. i.e. Sartid, Vongpradhip and Chulalongkorn U.. Data in each part are converted to general QR Code to give 3 QR Code patterns. The corresponding module in each pattern of QR Code was multiplexed, except the finder pattern and timing pattern, to form a QR Code with special symbols. At the receiving end, this QR Code with special symbols was scanned and the image with each special symbol representing a module was recognized by the program and was demultiplexed to its original QR Code patterns with 3 parts, i.e. Sartid, Vongpradhip and Chulalongkorn U., that can be read by ordinary QR Code reader. The data in each QR Code patterns were concatenated back to form its original information, i.e. Sartid Vongpradhip Chulalongkorn U. correctly.

original information correctly. In the experiment using 8 black and white symbols, the data in the QR Code can increased 3 times. This will lead to more research in the area of capacity improvement, security and information hiding in QR Code. V. REFERENCES

Fig. 4 Experiment with 8 special symbols

IV. CONCLUSION In this research, a novel method to increase data in QR Code was achieved by using multiplexing. There was a QR Code with special symbols introduced. From this QR Code with special symbols the data can be demultiplexed to give its

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