Does a QR code must be black and white?

With the sharp increasing of smart phones, QR code, capable of quick recognition and high speed of decoding, high storage capacity and high error acceptance, has been widely used in many fields, such as shopping, personal identification, digital downloads and so on. However, most of QR codes are black and white. The reason is high contrast. The bigger the differences in color between the background and the data modules are, the better is it to read. But does a QR code must be black and white? Of course not. QR code can be either colorful or recognizable only if it can be detected in binarization. Colorful QR code can not only leave people a deeper impression, but it can also convey more information than standard QR code. In order to make a QR code more delicate and readable for human, we propose a new embedding flow which can hide a QR code in a colorful image. Our algorithm remains uttermost parts of the colorful image when fusing the QR code. Experiments on plenty of colorful images with QR codes demonstrate that our fusion method can generate a more beautiful QR code and keeps its quick recognition ability simultaneously compared to the state-of-the-art methods.