The ubiquitous QR code and some similar barcodes suffer from two common drawbacks — poor user experience and inability to be identified. In order to help users identify the barcodes as well as improve the aesthetics of these barcodes, we design ARTcode — Adaptive Robust doT matrix barCode. The key idea is to integrate data hiding techniques into barcode design. We turn an image into a dot matrix utilizing dithering algorithms and embed data into this dot matrix with data hiding techniques. We perform several pre-processing approaches in order to stabilize the embedding capacity as well as protrude the details of the original image.
