Introduction

I did this out of curiousity of barcodes. So basically what I'm doing is: I take a photo with a digital camera, convert it to a 24 bit bmp so it's easy to read in, then this program will convert it to a 2 color image by first converting to a (pseudo) monochrome image, and from there I can convert it to a 2 color image using a threshold. After that I scan the image from left to right line by line until I find a pattern of a block of white, then a strip of black, white, and black all of the same size. Then I use that size to see if the lines of white and black are 1, 2, 3, or 4 times as big. Using the table on Wikipedia page for UPC codes, I convert those patterns into digits.

As a recent addition to the program, I also scan through the images in 4 different directions and make it try multiple thresholds.

Images

The image on the left is the original taken from the digital camera and then scaled down. The picture on the right was generated by the software before scanning for the barcode.

Download

barcode-2010-12-30.tar.gz (Source Code)

Copyright 1997-2025 - Michael Kohn