Stylize Aesthetic QR Code

With the continued proliferation of smart mobile devices, Quick Response (QR) code has become one of the mostused types of two-dimensional code in the world. Aiming at beautifying the appearance of QR codes, existing works have developed a series of techniques to make the QR code more visual-pleasant. However, these works still leave much to be desired, such as visual diversity, aesthetic quality, flexibility, universal property, and robustness. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel type of aesthetic QR codes, SEE (Stylize aEsthEtic) QR Code, and a three-stage automatic approach to produce such robust art-style-oriented code. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose a method to generate the optimized baseline aesthetic QR code, which reduces the visual contrast between the noise-like black/white modules and the blended image. In the second stage, to obtain style-orient QR code, we adjust an appropriate neural style transformation network to endowing the baseline aesthetic QR code with abstract art elements. In the third stage, we design an error-correction mechanism by balancing two competing terms, visual quality and readability, to ensure performance robust. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEE QR Code has a high quality in terms of both visual appearance and robustness, and also enables users to have more personalized choices.