Blended QR Code for Digital Advertising

Quick Response (QR) code has been widely used in everyone's daily lives for advertising purpose. This is a new norm lifestyle for worldwide customers during the pandemic and post-pandemic. Due to the dull appearance of traditional QR code, blended QR code is created by overlaying an advertisement with a QR code to strengthen the advertising effectiveness. Creating pleasant visibility of blended QR codes can catch the attention of customers and thus able to further engage with them. However, the direct embedding of a traditional QR code with its black and white modules will negatively affect the advertising impact when the advertisement is distorted. Hence, these data modules are the major reason that affects the appearance and yet they are the most critical aspect of decoding capability. As a result, it is a challenge to identify the tradeoff between decoding capability and visual appearance. Therefore, this paper proposes an algorithm that manages the number of data modules and the size of each data module to increase the advertising impact. The proposed algorithm provides more weightage to the pixels that are closer to the center region of each module, which maintains the data on hold inside the modules. The performance comparison between advertisement visibility and decoding capability is presented to verify the robustness of the proposed algorithm.