# Re: Bar codes

Tripp Lilley (tlilley@perspex.com)
Mon, 8 Mar 1999 17:33:18 -0500 (EST)

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On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Matthew Diesch wrote:

> Not strictly connected to this list but I'm trying all over the place to get
> this info so here goes. I want to do barcode detection/recognition on
> scanned images and so far the only s/w I can find is proprietry toolkits
> (mostly OCX stuff for MS).
>
> What I really want is either an open source library/toolkit or if all else
> fails some pointers to some algorithms for doing it in which case I'll do it
> myself.

Good luck! (Said with equal measures sincerity and sarcasm). I'm right
there with you, though. There are a couple of open-source OCR projects
I've found, but none really concerned with barcodes and other
machine-readable formats.

The latest (March 1999) issue of Circuit Cellar, Ink,
http://www.circuitcellar.com/ has an article on Code 39 with details on
how to decode it in hardware, which are largely applicable to decoding
from an image. However, you'll need to investigate deskewing and the like
before you actually get to the point of having a usable image from which
to recognize barcode.

If you're interested in recognizing 2D barcodes (like PDF-417), you've a
bit more work ahead of you. PDF-417 (a pretty popular 2D symbology) is, I
believe, owned by Symbol Technologies, but I understand that they're
pretty good about tech support, which means it ought to be straightforward
to get specs out of them.

I'm certainly interested in joining you on writing some GPL'ed recognition
code, if we can't find anything else. I have to warn you, though, that I
have a number of other things on my plate right now :-) (like the revised
reference PNM backend, and the Fujitsu backend once my docs come in).

Keep in touch!

    --
       Tripp Lilley + Innovative Workflow Engineering, Inc. + (tripp@iweinc.com)
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       Thomas Scoville in http://opensource.oreilly.com/news/scoville_0399.html

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