Barcode Scanning from Mobile-Phone Camera Photos Delivered Via MMS: Case Study

Price comparison services are commonly available via WWW interface and they belong to the most popular web-sites because their functionality is highly valued by users. However, in dynamic action of shopping, customers equipped in mobile devices have no time and conditions for precise describing products on their mini screens of PDAs or mobile phones. An alternative request for information about prices and availability of a product encountered during shopping might be sent to price comparator through MMS channel in the form of photograph with product's barcode. In the paper we describe a series of experiments using mobile phones for sending camera-made barcodes and deriving numerical equivalence for product ID. Experiments were conducted on a set of barcodes in ideal and real conditions using a library for software barcode scanning. Collected results show two main sources of difficulties in using such a system: human-related problems and technical issues described in the paper. A separate issue is availability of barcode id in product description stored in price comparator database.