OAcode: Overall Aesthetic 2D Barcode on Screen

Abstract

Nowadays, two-dimensional (2D) barcodes have been widely used in various domains. And a series of aesthetic 2D barcode schemes have been proposed to improve the visual quality and readability of 2D barcodes for better integration with marketing materials. Yet we believe that the existing aesthetic 2D barcode schemes are partially aesthetic because they only beautify the data area but retain the position detection patterns with the blackwhite appearance of traditional 2D barcode schemes. Thus, in this paper, we propose the first overall aesthetic 2D barcode scheme, called OAcode, in which the position detection pattern is canceled. Its detection process is based on the pre-designed symmetrical data area of OAcode, whose symmetry could be used as the calibration signal to restore the perspective transformation in the barcode scanning process. Moreover, an enhanced demodulation method is proposed to resist the lens distortion common in the camera-shooting process. The experimental results illustrate that when 5 × 5𝑐𝑚 OAcode is captured with a resolution of 720 × 1280 pixels, at the screen-camera distance of 10𝑐𝑚 and the angle less or equal to 25 • , OAcode has 100% detection rate and 99.5% demodulation accuracy. For 10 × 10𝑐𝑚 OAcode, it could be extracted by consumer-grade mobile phones at a distance of 90𝑐𝑚 with around 90% accuracy.