Thank you for looking into this.
The problem we have is that we are trying to detect QR codes from images from a document scanner, so we only have a single "bullet" recognizing the QR code. We won't be able to remove the phantoms, as we're not generating the codes ourselves.
About the slight distortions, we problably won't be able to eliminate them as they are caused by the scanner hardware - but we're unsure if this means that recognition with zxing is impossible.
In some cases the three finder patterns are correctly found, but the pixels in the finder patterns lead to a miscalculation of the module size and the dimension is incorrectly calculated (Detector.computeDimension throws NotFoundException or returns wrong result).
It seems also in other cases the module size is not correctly estimated leading to a rejection of correct finder patterns - I can debug into this but I'm not sure if it will lead anywhere...
Do you think there is anything we can do to increase our chances of recognizing the QR codes?
I could scan both images ok from computer screen using zxing app running on a Google Android Pixel XL phone device. Nicht image returned UPC code 16033522 but no idea if that code is correct or not...