Abstract: Aiming at the problem that the color QR code designed based on ZXing could not recognize pictures with arbitrary resolution, an adaptive reading and positioning method for color QR code was designed. which referred to the binary process of black and white QR code, According to the mapping relationship between the 2^k value luminance matrix and the bit matrix of color QR code, the formula of adaptive reading and positioning was established, which was mainly related to the size and k value of the bit matrix. Then according to the formula, the relevant algorithm was compiled to realize the adaptive reading and positioning function of color QR code. Traversing the image data multiple times was needed in the algorithm, so the decoding speed was determined by the size of the image resolution, which was represented by the number of pixels. The feasibility of this method is verified by analyzing the 4-color and 16-color QR code image data under three resolutions.