Enrichment of visual appearance of aesthetic QR code

Abstract

Quick Response (QR) code is a two dimensional barcode widely used in many applications. Similar to a visible watermarking technique, the visual appearance can be modified to display an image while a standard QR code reader can decode the data contained in such a QR code. In this paper, we consider the characteristic of images to be displayed on a QR code, and propose an effective method to produce a visually better aesthetic QR code without sacrificing its error correcting capability. We also investigate the shape of modules to represent the image to be displayed and consider the trade-off between the visual quality and its readability.