Masahiro Hara

Engineer of record

Masahiro Hara joined Denso Corporation as an engineer and was assigned to the auto-ID division that became Denso Wave. By the early 1990s he was leading a small team tasked with succeeding the one-dimensional barcode symbologies then in use in Japanese automotive component tracking. The team's output was the Quick Response Code, released in 1994.

Design decisions attributed

Several of the symbology's defining design decisions are attributed to Hara in the institutional record:

• The use of three large position-detection patterns set into the symbol's corners, permitting the scanner to determine orientation rapidly. The 1:1:3:1:1 ratio of the patterns was selected after analyzing the frequency distribution of patterns appearing on printed matter.
• A two-dimensional matrix structure rather than a stacked one-dimensional symbology, permitting a substantially larger payload in a smaller footprint.
• The integration of Reed–Solomon error correction at four selectable levels, permitting recovery from moderate damage characteristic of factory conditions.

Recognition

Hara was a finalist for the European Inventor Award in 2014, in recognition of the diffusion of the Quick Response Code from Japanese manufacturing into global infrastructure.