An old QR app I had for a long time (from when QR codes were first introduced, many years ago) failed to read it too. Some of the bits look ambiguous too --- e.g. taking the upper left corner bit of the upper left locator square to be (0,0), what's the bit at (16,11)? It's both noticeably darker and lighter than its neighbours, like it was cut out and then grew back slightly.

Those which can't read the code probably use traditional thresholding to reduce the input into 0-1 first, while those which can are using some variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft-decision_decoding algorithm.

It doesn't help either that the middle was blanked out, eating into the error correction budget.