Automated barcode recognition for smart identification and inspection automation

Barcodes have been widely used in many industrial products for automatic identification in data collection and inventory control purposes. It is well known that in many stores laser bar-code readers are used at check-out counters. However, there is a major constraint when this tool is used. That is, unlike traditional camera-based picturing, the distance between the laser reader (sensor) and the target object is close to zero when the reader is applied. This may result in inconvenience in inspection automation because the human operator has to manipulate either the sensor or the objects. For the purpose of in-store or inspection automation, the human operator needs to be removed from the process, i.e. a robot with visual capability is required to play an important role in such a system. Moreover, an automated system is required to find, locate and decode barcodes on various document images even with low resolution compared with laser barcode readers (about 15,000 dots per inch) and can handle damaged bar codes. This paper proposes a smart barcode detection and recognition system (SBDR) based on fast hierarchical Hough transform (HHT). The back-propagation neural network (BPNN) is selected as a powerful tool to perform the recognition process. The paper presents an effective method to utilize the specific graphic features of barcodes for positioning and recognition purposes even in case of distorted barcodes. The first step the system has to perform is to locate the position and orientation of the barcode in the required material document image. Secondly, the proposed system has to segment the barcode. Finally, a trained back-propagation neural network is used to perform the barcode recognition task. Experiments have been conducted to corroborate the efficiency of the proposed method.

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