The widespread use of QR codes motivates a vast creation of eyecatching
visual QR codes. Most of the visual QR codes are creative
artworks made by skilled artists or design experts. There is a web
site, QR code
R Artist [D’Haem 2010], that keeps track of news
and related resources about creative QR code artworks, and a plentiful
art gallery could be found in a flickr QR code art group [flickr
2009]. Owing to the commercial value behind such visually appealing
QR codes, most resources for creating artistic QR codes
are proprietary and only a few online tutorials [Chan 2011; Scheib
2010] are available. Commonly used strategies by artists to customize
a QR code include adding colors to modules, rounding the
hard edges, and embedding a small image in a QR code that relies
on inbuilt error correction capacity of QR code to restore from missing
modules (see Figure 2(a)). These attempts generally require a
trial-and-error style process to manually refine their works followed
by a readability verification process as evidenced in online custom
QR code design tools [Laporte 2012].