The convenience and high data storage capacity of Quick Response (QR) codes have contributed to the ubiquity of these codes in this era of advanced technological advancement. However, there have been growing security concerns in the application of QR codes for communicating private data. Therefore, the current study proposed a secure Bilinear Zooming Steganography Quick Response Code (BZSQRC) algorithm that can manipulate QR code images by encoding a secret message using a secure Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm. The Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the BZSQRC algorithm was 6.5% higher than that of the conventional LSB two-bit technique, which indicated enhanced steganographic image quality. An average noise reduction evaluation yielded a mean squared error as low as 0.0025. The proposed algorithm effectively compressed the module size of the QR code before embedding, which allowed QR codes with different module sizes in this study to be embedded into the same area. This study successfully demonstrated that the developed BZSQRC algorithm enhanced the PSNR and retained the readability and robustness of the QR code. It is recommended for future research to further augment the security layer by integrating secret keys and encryption.

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