Locating and decoding barcodes in fuzzy images captured by smart phones

With the development of barcodes for commercial use, people's requirements for detecting barcodes by smart phone become increasingly pressing. The low quality of barcode image captured by mobile phone always affects the decoding and recognition rates. This paper focuses on locating and decoding EAN-13 barcodes in fuzzy images. We present a more accurate locating algorithm based on segment length and high fault-tolerant rate algorithm for decoding barcodes. Unlike existing approaches, location algorithm is based on the edge segment length of EAN-13 barcodes, while our decoding algorithm allows the appearance of fuzzy region in barcode image. Experimental results are performed on damaged, contaminated and scratched digital images, and provide a quite promising result for EAN-13 barcode location and decoding.