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.