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QR (Quick Response) Codes are widely used as a convenient unidirectional communication channel to convey information , such as emails, hyperlinks, or phone numbers, from publicity materials to mobile devices. But the QR Code is not visually appealing and takes up valuable space of publicity materials. In this paper, we propose a new method to embed...
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... QR Code can hold a large amount of data. In addi- tion, an advanced error-correction method and other unique characteristics allow the QR Code to be read more reliably and at higher speeds than other codes [1], the structure of QR Code is shown in Fig. 3. The QR Code is a 2-D ma- trix code that conveys information by the arrangement of its dark and light elements, called "modules", in columns and rows. The QR Code modules perform several functions: Some contain the actual data itself, while others are grouped into various function patterns that improve reading perfor- mance and allow ...
Citations
... Previous research on customers' QR code usage has focused on QR codes' visual appearance (Gao et al., 2015;Tsai & Peng, 2023); acceptance (Kim & Woo, 2016); use alongside with mobile trust and technology acceptance in omnichannel (Lawry & Choi, 2013); perceptions of codes on milk packages (Lau et al., 2022); impact on customer satisfaction and purchase intention (Hossain et al., 2018); customer experience (Shin et al., 2012); and print advertisements with codes (Trivedi et al., 2019). Even though QR codes have been investigated from multiple perspectives, there is a gap in our understanding of why customers do not use QR codes in B&M stores. ...
... The visual appeal of QR codes has been noted as a usage barrier, as Gao et al. (2015) criticized that the tedious black-and-white code distracts from the quality of the advertisement. Thus, beautified (Tsai & Peng, 2023), invisible (Gao et al., 2015), stylized aesthetic (Xu et al., 2019), and colorful and decorated QR codes have been invented in an attempt to make the codes more attractive (Lin et al., 2013). ...
... The visual appeal of QR codes has been noted as a usage barrier, as Gao et al. (2015) criticized that the tedious black-and-white code distracts from the quality of the advertisement. Thus, beautified (Tsai & Peng, 2023), invisible (Gao et al., 2015), stylized aesthetic (Xu et al., 2019), and colorful and decorated QR codes have been invented in an attempt to make the codes more attractive (Lin et al., 2013). In the luxury context, the visual appeal of QR codes was linked to customers' QR code scanning intentions (Lawry & Choi, 2013). ...
The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that hinder customers from utilizing QR codes when they visit brick-and-mortar (B&M) stores. The research was conducted at a Finnish fashion retailer, where three types of QR codes were displayed for customers to use. In order to identify the barriers that customers face, two different sets of data were collected and analyzed: open-ended survey data (n = 101) and interview data (n = 16). The findings showed two main categories of barriers, customer and company related, with seven sub-barriers. The customer-related barriers included lack of interest in QR codes, user-related usage issues, desire for a device-free B&M store, and dislike toward QR codes. The company-related barriers included unnoticeable QR codes in the B&M store, service personnel in the B&M store, and QR code-related technical problems.
... Previous research on customers' QR code usage has focused on QR codes' visual appearance (Gao et al., 2015;Tsai & Peng, 2023); acceptance (Kim & Woo, 2016); use alongside with mobile trust and technology acceptance in omnichannel (Lawry & Choi, 2013); perceptions of codes on milk packages (Lau et al., 2022); impact on customer satisfaction and purchase intention (Hossain et al., 2018); customer experience (Shin et al., 2012); and print advertisements with codes (Trivedi et al., 2019). Even though QR codes have been investigated from multiple perspectives, there is a gap in our understanding of why customers do not use QR codes in B&M stores. ...
... The visual appeal of QR codes has been noted as a usage barrier, as Gao et al. (2015) criticized that the tedious black-and-white code distracts from the quality of the advertisement. Thus, beautified (Tsai & Peng, 2023), invisible (Gao et al., 2015), stylized aesthetic (Xu et al., 2019), and colorful and decorated QR codes have been invented in an attempt to make the codes more attractive (Lin et al., 2013). ...
... The visual appeal of QR codes has been noted as a usage barrier, as Gao et al. (2015) criticized that the tedious black-and-white code distracts from the quality of the advertisement. Thus, beautified (Tsai & Peng, 2023), invisible (Gao et al., 2015), stylized aesthetic (Xu et al., 2019), and colorful and decorated QR codes have been invented in an attempt to make the codes more attractive (Lin et al., 2013). In the luxury context, the visual appeal of QR codes was linked to customers' QR code scanning intentions (Lawry & Choi, 2013). ...
The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that hinder customers from utilizing QR codes when they visit brick-and-mortar (B&M) stores. The research was conducted at a Finnish fashion retailer, where three types of QR codes were displayed for customers to use. In order to identify the barriers that customers face, two different sets of data were collected and analyzed: open-ended survey data (n = 101) and interview data (n = 16). The findings showed two main categories of barriers, customer and company related, with seven sub-barriers. The customer-related barriers included lack of interest in QR codes, user-related usage issues, desire for a device-free B&M store, and dislike toward QR codes. The company-related barriers included unnoticeable QR codes in the B&M store, service personnel in the B&M store, and QR code-related technical problems.
... In practical applications, the camera imaging process inevitably introduces a series of distortions into original images, which will break the hidden information in images. Gao et al. [8] exploited the difference between human eyes and semiconductor imaging sensors in the temporal convolution of optical signals to make QR codes invisible for human eyes but detectable for mobile devices. However, this approach can be only applied to display screens and not to printed materials. ...
In the era of multimedia and Internet, people are eager to obtain information from offline to online. Quick Response (QR) codes and digital watermarks help us access information quickly. However, QR codes look ugly and invisible watermarks can be easily broken in physical photographs. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method to embed hyperlinks into natural images, making the hyperlinks invisible for human eyes but detectable for mobile devices. Our method is an end-to-end neural network with an encoder to hide information and a decoder to recover information. From original images to physical photographs, camera imaging process will introduce a series of distortion such as noise, blur, and light. To train a robust decoder against the physical distortion from the real world, a distortion network based on 3D rendering is inserted between the encoder and the decoder to simulate the camera imaging process. Besides, in order to maintain the visual attraction of the image with hyperlinks, we propose a loss function based on just noticeable difference (JND) to supervise the training of encoder. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous method in both simulated and real situations.
... Applications of smart lighting: Recently, many works have been aware of the disparity of imaging mechanisms of camera rolling shutters and human eyes, and leveraged the disparity to enable multiple applications including privacy protection [29,41,50,53,54,71], anti-piracy [23,46,51,70], copyright protection for digital images/videos [22,28,32,47,56,57] and invisible screen-camera communications [13,38,44,59,63]. For instance, LiShield [71] protects a physical scene automatically against photographing, by illuminating it with high-frequency flickering in specialized waveforms from LED lighting, which can ruin photos or videos taken by smartphone cameras equipped with rolling shutter [27]. ...
Quick response (QR) codes have found versatile usage in numerous applications, but have also posed severe security threats such as privacy leakage, phishing and even payment inception if the codes are hijacked. The hijacking is often assumed to be preventable by physically isolating the codes from possible attackers, e.g., putting the QR code inside a glass cabinet distant to outsiders. In this paper, we explore a new QR code hijacking attack, named Li-Man, that can subvert such protection using smart LED. The key idea is to illuminate a target victim QR code from afar using specialized flickering light waveforms, which can transform the code to be any other predefined malicious ones when being captured by smart-phone cameras, while keeping the attack invisible to human visual perception. Li-Man builds on a modeling framework that harnesses the disparity between camera and human imaging mechanisms. We develop a Li-Man simulator and also implement a prototype to verify the feasibility and threat level of Li-Man. Experiments demonstrate that Li-Man can successfully realize the invisible hijacking of QR codes from multiple hidden positions in constrained space. On the other hand, we propose and verify a primary countermeasure that is promising to defeat the Li-Man attack.
... This result can be regarded as a guidance for applications involving TPVM. In some TPVM-based applications, such as dual-view medical image visualization and invisible QR code [20], the information that need to be hide can choose its spatial and temporal frequency higher than the red line but not too much higher, to remain visible for cameras. ...
In normal conditions, the Critical Flicker Frequency is usually 60Hz. But in some special conditions, such as low spatial frequency and high contrast between frames, these special conditions have high probability to occur in some TPVM-based applications. So it’s extremely important to verify if a visual signal with a combination of temporal and spatial frequency can be recognize by human eyes. Based on the research in the last paper’’Window of Visibility’ inspired security lighting system’, this paper introduces the measuring method of WoV of human eyes. In this paper we will measure critical flicker frequency in low spatial frequency and high contrast conditions, and we can witness a different conclusion from the normal conditions.
... QR codes were first invented for tracking vehicles and parts during the manufacturing process, recently with the rapid development of mobile Internet, these have been widely applied to many different fields. This has resulted in an increased research interest in the technology necessary for embellishing QR codes [2], [3], [4], [5], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16]. Currently, the existing foundation algorithms of generating embellished QR codes can be classified into four groups: embedding icons [17], replacing colors [18], changing the module shape [3], [14], and adjusting codewords [2]. ...
QR codes are usually scanned in different environments, so they must be robust to variations in illumination, scale, coverage, and camera angles. Aesthetic QR codes improve the visual quality, but subtle changes in their appearance may cause scanning failure. In this paper, a new method to generate scanning-robust aesthetic QR codes is proposed, which is based on a module-based scanning probability estimation model that can effectively balance the tradeoff between visual quality and scanning robustness. Our method locally adjusts the luminance of each module by estimating the probability of successful sampling. The approach adopts the hierarchical, coarse-to-fine strategy to enhance the visual quality of aesthetic QR codes, which sequentially generate the following three codes: a binary aesthetic QR code, a grayscale aesthetic QR code, and the final color aesthetic QR code. Our approach also can be used to create QR codes with different visual styles by adjusting some initialization parameters. User surveys and decoding experiments were adopted for evaluating our method compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, which indicates that the proposed approach has excellent performance in terms of both visual quality and scanning robustness.
... Early efforts employed techniques like region-of-interest masking, blurring, mosaicking, etc. [56], or re-encoding using encrypted scrambling seeds [18]. There also exists a vast body of work for hiding copyright marks and other information in digital images/videos [27,38,39,45,52,63,89,90,97,101]. LiShield's barcode protection is inspired by these schemes, but it aims to protect physical scenes prior to capturing. ...
The ubiquity of mobile camera devices has been triggering an outcry of privacy concerns, whereas privacy protection still relies on the cooperation of the photographer or camera hardware, which can hardly be guaranteed in practice. In this paper, we introduce LiShield, which automatically protects a physical scene against photographing, by illuminating it with smart LEDs flickering in specialized waveforms. We use a model-driven approach to optimize the waveform, so as to ensure protection against the (uncontrollable) cameras and potential image-processing based attacks. We have also designed mechanisms to unblock authorized cameras and enable graceful degradation under strong ambient light interference. Our prototype implementation and experiments show that LiShield can effectively destroy unauthorized capturing while maintaining robustness against potential attacks.
... A new video projection technique to defeat camcorder piracy in movie theaters is presented in [16], [17]. Invisible QR Code [18] is a new way of embedding QR Code on digital screen. The QR Codes embedded on screen is perceptually transparent to human but detectable for mobile devices. ...
... Gillis and Glineur [33] proposed a simple way that significantly accelerates the iterations. Supposing NK > MN + MK (i.e., the number of entries in X and W is smaller than that in Y), the computation ofà or C is the most expensive among the learning rules in (17) or (18). For a typical TPVM system, we can let N = 512 × 512, K = 80 and M = 16, then NK = 20, 971, 512 > MN + MK = 4 195 584. ...
... Now, the timeconsuming steps should be performed sparingly to improve the efficiency. This can be achieved by updating (17) or (18) several times before the next update (18) or (17). The numbers of inner iterations of (17) and (18) can be determined by the flop counts and the supplementary stopping criterion described in [33]. ...
Temporal psychovisual modulation (TPVM) is a new information display technology which aims to generate multiple visual percepts for different viewers on a single display simultaneously. In a TPVM system, the viewers wearing different active liquid crystal (LC) glasses with varying transparency levels can see different images (called personal views). The viewers without LC glasses can also see a semantically meaningful image (called shared view). The display frames and weights for the LC glasses in the TPVM system can be computed through nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with three additional constrains: the values of images and modulation weights should have upper bound (i.e., limited luminance of the display and transparency level of the LC); the shared view without using viewing devices should be considered (i.e., the sum of all basis images should be a meaningful image); and the sparsity of modulation weights should be considered due to the material property of LC. In this paper, we proposed to solve the constrained NMF problem by a modified version of hierarchical alternating least squares (HALS) algorithms. Through experiments, we analyze the choice of parameters in the setup of TPVM system. This work serves as a guideline for practical implementation of TPVM display system.
In recent years, QR (Quick Response) codes have gained popularity in facilitating information sharing with camera-equipped devices like smartphones and tablets. This technology is suitable for multiple applications, such as verification of COVID-19 vaccination, multi-factor authentication, or ease URL and contact sharing. Despite its huge adoption, security researchers have mainly focused on using QR codes as a vector for phishing attacks, exploiting the simplicity of hiding malicious URLs in a not human-readable format. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the potential QR codes have in being a suitable vector for cyberattacks.
In this paper, we design a fuzzing-based methodology to discover bugs and vulnerabilities in mobile applications receiving inputs from QR codes. Our framework is suitable for many different application categories, and it is highly flexible in handling various behavior of the apps before and after the scan takes place. We implemented our methodology in a toolkit, QRFuzz, which enables testing multiple codes in an automated way, looking for crashes, errors, and abnormal behaviors in applications. In our first experiment, we tested 20 popular Android apps with a dictionary of strings containing symbols, weird ASCII characters, and known malicious payloads. Our tests on about two thousand payloads showed that our tool correctly scanned almost all the given codes. During our first testing, we found a crash on a popular social application with over 1 billion downloads and on the official Italian COVID-19 vaccination verification app. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework enabling the fuzzing of applications via QR codes. We open-sourced QRFuzz\(^1\) so that other researchers can tackle the issue and developers can independently identify bugs.
The contactless new normal dictated by the global pandemic has re-introduced the nearly three-decade-old QR codes as a new standard of conveyance of information. Not only are they now ubiquitous to the general public but also inseparable to social, commercial and bureaucratic life. Recent history has been witnessing plenty of technical and artistic effort to make these normally abstract and unattractive clusters of dark and light quadratic shapes more eye-catching. In commercial terms, this is particularly motivated by the aim of rendering the code symbols a point of attraction as such, thus securing a more engaging customer interaction. Customized QR codes, having often been associated with brand images and commercial identities, are observed to come closer to the proximity of trademark law. However, the ubiquity and the technically necessary format standards of QR symbols tend to root against the primary premise of the trademarks: distinctiveness. This article seeks to answer whether the signs consisting of or incorporating QR symbols could fulfill the distinctiveness requirement within the framework of the EU law. Given the lack of jurisprudential apprehension of the question at hand, the article, first, sets about reasoning a distinctiveness test on the face of the EU trademark law and that of the relatable jurisprudential interpretations. Secondly, it goes on to administer this test on the signs that consist of or incorporate QR symbols. In the latter respect, limited jurisprudential hints from the Member States and the EUIPO practices shall be put in perspective and compounded with the imperatives of substantive law. The article, consequently substantiates that there is no one-fits-all formula to the question at hand and that QR symbols shall not be excluded as trademarks merely because they are essentially standardized.
