Reading QR Codes on challenging surfaces using thin-plate splines

Ismael Benito-Altamirano, David Martínez-Carpena, Hanna Lizarzaburu-Aguilar, Cristian Fàbrega, Joan Daniel Prades

Abstract: Highlights•QR Codes on top of daily objects with complex surfaces are challenging to read.•The visual features of standard QR Codes can be landmarks to predict such underlying surface.•Basic transformations (like affine, projective or cylindrical) can predict and revert deformation in simple cases.•A more general transformation, based on thin-plate splines (TPS), can predict and correct deformations from arbitrary surface topographies.•TPS outperforms current readers (ZBar) and the other methods proposed before.