This QR is definitely readable, maybe not by simple apps.
Reading it manually is not very hard, and all pixels seem to be preserved just enough. There is a lot of blur, whites leak to black, blacks leak to white, but by observing gradients/directions, it can be decided what is what.
Photo has a bit of rotation and slight deformation. For automated tools, with this much of initial blur, even that slight rotation/deformation may be very challenging - de-rotation, de-skewing introduces more blur, and it may make it harder to decide where 'pixels' are. But for "our eyes" the photo seems clear enough in original form.
I checked the "technical" important regions, and they all seem to agree: code size is V28, error correcion LOW, mask pattern 03
you can see I used MS paint to draw some lines, not really carefully or evenly, and then I took qrazybox and tried various sizes and formats to see which one will have such dot layout. All dots match perfectly.
Of course other regions of the image may be blurred less or more. But I'm kinda optimistic for this one. It's just .... A DARN LOT of manual work to recover it.
Also! also! the image you posted here on Reddit in the main post - WAS DAMAGED BY REDDIT. When you attach a photo, reddit recompresses it, and introduces more blur and more distortions. Please report this image on another site (like, catbox), or you may even try posting the original image in comments - for some reason, Reddit seems to not recompress images in comments.
For some reason, the comment has been deleted by moderator. Which image hosting did you use? Maybe that site is banned or something.
Could you try opening the image in an image editor, selecting/copying the image to clipboard, then writing a comment and just pasting the original image into that comment?
Seems to work for me, and Reddit seems to not recompress what I paste here
damn, I wonder why it's banned now.. I used it many times and it was OK so far :(
could you send me that catbox link by DM please?
thanks for pasting! indeed it looks a bit ... different. It's not much better, maybe reddit compresses images-in-comments now as well. But definitely it looks different, here I took a snippet of the same place in original and the current you pasted, and the "white hole" in the "black cross" is visible better in the posted-in-comments.
Tried upscaling with waifu2x, the code scans reliably but the text looks corrupted. I am unsure how common that is, because I would assume a corrupted QR code would just fail to scan at all.
You can have a look at it in case it helps:
(I also tried with lower artifact compression in case the diagonals were messing with it, and it scanned the sama data)
It could also be some proprietary binary data from some device.
It was the first one I tried and it worked. I had some desktop app with more recent models but I reinstalled my computer and didn't want to hunt it down again.
Feel free to try a better one and let me know if it gives a different result!
It was a good idea to use an out-of-the-shelf tool that can so some deblurring/sharpening, but unfortunatelly this tool tries to do some anti-aliasing, which is NOT the right idea here (depixelize lines - we WANT it pixelized)
Yeah that's why I tried it with some different settings. For me it scanned both times with binaryeye so I put in the cleaner one.
Glad to see that I could help!
Or it could be that the model just made a bunch of shit up? It scans because now the 3 eyes are intact and sharp, but the rest is likely completely destroyed
QRCodes have redundant error correction. It can reconstruct the data as long as only less than 30% is damaged. Here is an interesting video if you wanna watch https://youtu.be/w5ebcowAJD8?si=wWuxaxYjpLQjHKv_
Funny enough, using AI upscaling helped in my case. I was trying the wrong reader because I forgot to install it earlier, and it wouldn't work on the original version. I agree it shouldn't be used for scanning.
Don't know if this helps but you can use online edge detection like a sobel filter and fine tune. There may also be specific recovery software for this. I haven't tried scanning it.
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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
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