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Structure-aware QR Code abstraction

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Abstract

Quick Response Codes (QR Codes) have proved to be a great success in both automotive industry and general commercial use. However, in most cases, QR Codes are not identified as aesthetical, since the original motivation to invent QR Codes is to achieve high speed and high readability in scanning. This paper proposes a solution framework for QR Code abstraction, which produces machine readable QR Code that is visually similar to the input image. Unlike the existing schemes for QR Code abstraction, which produces QR Codes of low resolution, the framework aims to resolve the high computation complexity of producing halftone QR Codes of high resolution with both similarity and readability preserved. The solution framework has been implemented and tested on various input texts and images, and a user study was conducted to evaluate its performance in preserving similarity. The experimental results show that the framework can produce QR Codes of high resolution and high similarity without compromising readability.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all reviewers for their helpful suggestions and constructive comments. The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61202154, 61272326, 61133009), the National Basic Research Project of China (No. 2011CB302203), National Key Technology R&D Program (No. 2012BAH55F02), Shanghai Pujiang Program (No. 13PJ1404500), the Grant of University of Macau under Grant No. MYRG2014-00139-FST and MYRG202(Y1-L4)-FST11-WEH, the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality Program (No. 13511505000), the Interdisciplinary Program of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (No. 14JCY10), and the Open Project Program of the State Key Lab of CAD&CG (No. A1401), Zhejiang University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Siyuan Qiao, Xiaoxin Fang & Bin Sheng

  2. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Bin Sheng & Enhua Wu

  3. Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macao, China

    Wen Wu & Enhua Wu

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  1. Siyuan Qiao
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  2. Xiaoxin Fang
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  3. Bin Sheng
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  4. Wen Wu
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  5. Enhua Wu
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Correspondence to Bin Sheng.

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Qiao, S., Fang, X., Sheng, B. et al. Structure-aware QR Code abstraction. Vis Comput 31, 1123–1133 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1107-x

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