  QR codes are usually scanned in different environments, so they must be
robust to variations in illumination, scale, coverage, and camera angles.
Aesthetic QR codes improve the visual quality, but subtle changes in their
appearance may cause scanning failure. In this paper, a new method to generate
scanning-robust aesthetic QR codes is proposed, which is based on a
module-based scanning probability estimation model that can effectively balance
the tradeoff between visual quality and scanning robustness. Our method locally
adjusts the luminance of each module by estimating the probability of
successful sampling. The approach adopts the hierarchical, coarse-to-fine
strategy to enhance the visual quality of aesthetic QR codes, which
sequentially generate the following three codes: a binary aesthetic QR code, a
grayscale aesthetic QR code, and the final color aesthetic QR code. Our
approach also can be used to create QR codes with different visual styles by
adjusting some initialization parameters. User surveys and decoding experiments
were adopted for evaluating our method compared with state-of-the-art
algorithms, which indicates that the proposed approach has excellent
performance in terms of both visual quality and scanning robustness.
