New multimedia archiving technique using multiple quick-response codes

Quick Response (QR) code is a two-dimensional bar-code, which is quite popular due to its excellent storage capacity and error resilience. Generally, QR codes are widely used to store text information such as URL links, geographical coordinates, name cards, inventory information, authorship, etc. To reach the current limit of QR codes, in this paper, we would like to propose an innovative multimedia archiving technique, which is built upon the advanced signal processing scheme to tackle the multiple QR codes all at once. The multimedia data often include texts, images, audio data, special-purpose codes, etc. The recently proposed software-defined multiplexing code (SDMC) can be applied to combine all of them even though each type of data would have the individual data format different from others. Our proposed new archiving technique involves two phases, namely multimedia-amalgamation (MA) and multimedia-detachment (MD). In the MA phase, the multimedia data, regardless of their data format, can be converted to the binary streams; then the SDMC will be employed to aggregate them together in a longer binary stream; such an ultimate long binary stream will be converted to the QR codes. The QR codes, protected by the inherent error-correction mechanism, will thus be placed on a sheet or multiple sheets with a uniform spacing. The sheet(s) containing multiple QR codes can thus be archived in soft (PDF) or hard (print-out) copies. In the MD (recovery) phase, one can scan these PDF files and employ our designed signal processing algorithms to separate the individual QR codes; then the corresponding QR decoder can convert these QR codes back to the original binary stream. Finally the unstuffing algorithm in the SDMC can detach the individual data from the long binary stream composed by the multimedia mixture.