A low cost optical barcode reader using a webcam

Abstract

Since their introduction in early J950's. barcodes have been found to be useful in many areas of applications. Today it has become the de-facto standards for object identification and labeling in many industries. There are several standards of barcodes including the most popular EAN-13 and Ul'C. Most commercially available barcode readers usc a scanning laser beam to read the code. With these scanners the operator has to manually align the barcode segment within a linearly scanning laser beam. Marc advanced scanners on the other hand use CCD sensors to acquire the barcode as a two-dimensional image then use image processing techniques [or localization and extraction of the code. However these tyPCSof scanners are much more expensive compared to the laser scanning type.