QR code embellishment with background facial image embedding

QR code is a kind of two-dimensional barcode which has been widely used in many fields. Traditional QR code that strictly complies with the international standard contains only regular black/white modules. These QR codes could be recognized solely by machine reader and contain no human readable information. In recent years, both commercial companies and research community try to beauty and enrich the expression capability of QR code under the framework of the standard. There are mainly three ways for QR code decoration, i.e. module colorization, module/QR code shape variation and image embedding. Most of these work utilize the Error Correction mechanism of QR code, modify moderate amount of modules and achieve target embellishment design. In order to convey more information as well as beautification, image embedding is the best choice. Existing methods either embed small image into the center of QR codes or use half-tone technique to handle input images. However, both methods heavily rely on the Error Correction mechanism, thus will reduce the readability. Moreover, small color image is not clear enough for zooming out/distance view and half-tone image has limited visual effects. Inspired by the work of Wakahara and Yamamoto [Wakahara and Yamamoto 2011], we propose a novel method that utilizes the redundancy of encoding for facial image embedding into the QR code. The Error Correction ability will not be sacrificed.