Section 1.1: Essential Libraries

To handle QR code encoding and decoding, two key libraries are needed: qrcode and OpenCV. To install these packages, open your terminal, activate your virtual environment (if applicable), and run the following command:

pip install qrcode opencv-python

OpenCV is a widely-used library in the realm of Computer Vision. If you’re eager to explore this fascinating field of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, check out my guide titled "How To Start Learning Computer Vision in 2022."

Subsection 1.1.1: Creating Your First QR Code

Once you've set up your environment, you can initiate a new project and open a main.py file. Here’s a simple code snippet to create a QR code:

import qrcode

# Store the information to encode

data = "Hello world!"

# Generate the QR code

img = qrcode.make(data)

# Save the QR code image

img.save("qr.jpg")

Congratulations! You've successfully created a QR code with minimal effort.

If you wish to enhance your QR code, you can customize several parameters during the creation process:

import qrcode

qr = qrcode.QRCode(

version=1,

error_correction=qrcode.constants.ERROR_CORRECT_L,

box_size=10,

border=4,

)

In this snippet, the parameters are defined as follows:

• version: Specifies the size of the QR code matrix.
• error_correction: Determines the level of error correction for scanning the QR code.
• box_size: Sets the pixel size for each box in the QR code.
• border: Adjusts the thickness of the border around the QR code.

Feel free to experiment with these settings!

Section 1.2: Decoding QR Codes

There may be instances where you need to decode a QR code you encounter. For this, we will utilize the OpenCV library:

import cv2

# Initialize the QR code decoder

decoder = cv2.QRCodeDetector()

# Load the QR code image

file_name = "qr.jpg"

qr_img = cv2.imread(file_name)

# Decode the image and display the information

data, data_points, qrcode = decoder.detectAndDecode(qr_img)

print(data)

And there you have it! Running this code will display the string you encoded earlier (in this case, "Hello world!"). You can now encode any string you like!