Aesthetic QR Codes Based on Two-Stage Image Blending

Abstract

With the popularization of smart phones, Quick Response (QR) code becomes one of the most widely used two-dimensional barcodes. Standard QR code consists of black and white squares (called modules) and its noise-like appearance would seriously disrupt the aesthetic appeal of its carrier, e.g., a poster. To make QR code more aesthetic, this paper proposes an automatic approach for blending a visual-unattractive QR code with a background image. This approach consists of two stages: module-based blending and pixel-based blending. At the first stage, a binary aesthetic QR code is generated module by module. At the second stage, a color aesthetic QR code is further generated pixel by pixel. The advantages of our approach are: 1) greatly enhancing the aesthetic appearance of the original QR code, 2) maintaining the error correction capacity of the standard QR code, 3) allowing full-area blending of various photographs, drawings and graphics. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces high quality QR codes in terms of both visual appearance and readability.