Aesthetic QR Code Based on Modified Systematic Encoding Function

Minoru KURIBAYASHI  Masakatu MORII  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E100-D   No.1   pp.42-51
Publication Date: 2017/01/01
Publicized: 2016/10/07
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2016MUP0002
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Enriched Multimedia —New Technology Trends in Creation, Utilization and Protection of Multimedia Information—)
Category: 
Keyword: 
2-dimensional code,  aesthetic code,  parity check matrix,  

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Summary: 
Quick Response (QR) code is a two dimensional barcode widely used in many applications. A standard QR code consists of black and white square modules, and it appears randomized patterns. By modifying the modules using certain rule, it is possible to display a logo image on the QR code. Such a QR code is called an aesthetic QR code. In this paper, we change the encoding method of the Reed-Solomon (RS) code to produce an aesthetic QR code without sacrificing its error correcting capability. The proposed method randomly produces candidates of RS blocks and finds the best one during encoding. Considering an image to be displayed, we also introduce a weighting function during random selection that classifies the visually important regions in the image. We further investigate the shape of modules which represents the image and consider the trade-off between the visual quality and its readability. As a result, we can produce a beautiful aesthetic QR code, which still can be decoded by standard QR code reader.