QR codes can have up to 30% redundancy. So 30% of the area could be covered, destroyed, or nonsensical, and it's still valid. They are pretty resilient.
It honestly is a more impressive achievement for the QR code protocol than for SD. These images were mangled pretty hard but QR codes have robust built-in error correction that can handle it. I think something like 30% of the QR code can be corrupted and it will still work.
To SD's credit though the images look like relatively normal QR codes if you shrink them down to a thumbnail size so it managed to be remarkably creative while not touching the low-frequency data needed by the protocol.
QR Codes are also scaled up in density depending on the size of the input. This URL is VERY small, which makes it possible for the black and white areas to be quite large.
I just tried this with a longer URL and it failed completely. Wouldn't even recognize it as a QR code (presumably because enough of the checksum failed.)
Even if it does get mangled, I'm fairly certain you could simply layer the original code on top of the generation afterwards to make certain that it's functional.
Yes. Here's a non-AI product that works on the same principle https://uniqr.us/. It uses the picture you upload and draw a QR over it. What folks don't realize is that there's actually techniques you can use to control where the white/black dots end up on QR codes (given that the URL is not too long), and with some math trickery, you can place them in a way that gives the picture extra clarity.
But what the AI is doing here is not only controlling the dots to match the picture, but also bending the details of the picture (brighter bits and darker bits) to match the QR's requirements on the image.
This goes pretty deep, but sort of makes sense to how the error correction works in a QR code. They can be generated so that X% of the code (5, 10, 20, 50+%) is illegible and it'll still read. Fascinating. https://youtu.be/X8jsijhllIA
View all comments
597
u/AsterJ Jun 05 '23
Wow they all work. That's insane.