QR Code a Brief Histroy.

Invented in Japan by the Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994 the life of the QR Code started to track vehicles during the manufacturing process. Today the QR Code is one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. It was designed to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

Unlike the old barcode that was designed to be mechanically scanned by a narrow beam of light, the QR code is detected as a 2-dimensional digital image by a camera sensor and is then digitally analyzed. The analysis process locates the three distinctive squares at the corners of the image, and normalizes image size, orientation, and angle of viewing, also aided with the use the smaller square near the fourth corner. Each dot is then converted to binary code and validity checked with an error-correcting code.

The use of QR Codes is free of any license. The QR Code is clearly defined and published as an ISO standard.

Denso Wave owns the patent rights on QR Codes, but has chosen not to exercise them.