JPEG compression of monochrome 2D-barcode images using DCT coefficient distributions

Two dimensional (2D) barcodes are becoming a pervasive interface for mobile devices, such as camera phones. Often, only monochrome 2D-barcodes are used due to their robustness in an uncontrolled operating environment of camera phones. Most camera phones capture and store such 2D-barcode images in the baseline JPEG format. As a lossy compression technique, JPEG does introduce a fair amount of error in the decoding of captured 2D-barcode images. In this paper, we introduce an improved JPEG compression scheme for such barcode images. By altering the JPEG compression parameters based on the DCT coefficient distribution of such barcode images, the improved compression scheme produces JPEG images with higher PSNR value as compared to the baseline implementation. We have also applied our improved scheme to a real 2D-barcode system - the QR Code and analyzed its performance against the baseline JPEG scheme.