2D Barcodes as Watermarks in Image Authentication

2D barcodes are increasingly used as tags in every type of goods for unique identification. Compared with the 1D barcodes, 2D barcodes not only can carry more data but also can withstand errors in subsequent scans. This property has significant parallels to watermarking logos as such watermarks will withstand multiple manipulations that are common with image transactions. We use a 2D Barcode as the watermark as this has error correction capabilities and show that this can be used to insert data imperceptibly into the host image. One Barcode is inserted into the low frequency component of the image and a second Barcode watermark is embedded into low pass component of any wavelet decomposition at a specific level only known to the author. This improves the resistance of the watermarking scheme to attack. Our experimental results indicate that these invisible watermarks can carry significant information and are robust to many image manipulations.