We formulate the synthesis of halftone QR codes as an optimization that assigns patterns to modules by computing an objective function comprising two terms, reliability and regularization.
While reliability prefers selection of high reliability patterns in order to maximize the readability of modules; regularization aims to control the appearance of modules via the target halftone image using a similarity distance metric. We introduce a single control parameter to
balance these two terms and solve the pattern assignment using a graph cut formulation.