Customized 2D Barcode Sensing for Anti-Counterfeiting Application in Smart IoT with Fast Encoding and Information Hiding

• Main Authors: Rongjun Chen, Yongxing Yu, Jiangtao Chen, Yongbin Zhong, Huimin Zhao, Amir Hussain, Hong-Zhou Tan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: anti-counterfeiting; 2D barcode; information hiding; perceptual quality
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/17/4926

With the development of commodity economy, the emergence of fake and shoddy products has seriously harmed the interests of consumers and enterprises. To tackle this challenge, customized 2D barcode is proposed to satisfy the requirements of the enterprise anti-counterfeiting certification. Based on information hiding technology, the proposed approach can solve these challenging problems and provide a low-cost, difficult to forge, and easy to identify solution, while achieving the function of conventional 2D barcodes. By weighting between the perceptual quality and decoding robustness in sensing recognition, the customized 2D barcode can maintain a better aesthetic appearance for anti-counterfeiting and achieve fast encoding. A new picture-embedding scheme was designed to consider 2D barcode, within a unit image block as a basic encoding unit, where the 2D barcode finder patterns were embedded after encoding. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed customized barcode could provide better encoding characteristics, while maintaining better decoding robustness than several state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, as a closed source 2D barcode that could be visually anti-counterfeit, the customized 2D barcode could effectively prevent counterfeiting that replicate physical labels. Benefitting from the high-security, high information capacity, and low-cost, the proposed customized 2D barcode with sensing recognition scheme provide a highly practical, valuable in terms of marketing, and anti-counterfeiting traceable solution for future smart IoT applications.