Systems and methods are provided for: receiving an image containing a code that has one or more visual qualities that fail to satisfy respective thresholds; applying a trained machine learning model to find a rough location of the code by generating a bounding box and cropping out the portion of the image; applying another trained machine learning model to the portion of the image to estimate key point locations of the code depicted in the portion of the image, aligning the portion of the image that depicts the code based on the estimated key point locations; and decoding, by the other trained machine learning model, the aligned portion of the image that depicts the code.