Edge-Based Expansion Method for Barcode Locating Under Complicated Environments

Abstract

Barcode recognition technology has been widely used in people's daily life and industrial production. Barcode locating and recognition based on image processing are affected by light environment, image content, lens focus and other factors. It will lead to inaccurate identification. A method of edge-based expansion for barcode locating is proposed according to edge characteristics. Firstly, the modified Sobel operator is used to extract the edges in the image and these edges are extended to advance the connectivity. After that, barcode area is distin-guished by the shape features of the image's connected area. Finally, slanted barcode is corrected using Radon trans-form to improve the recognition performance. The experimental results show that the locating accuracy of proposed method is significantly improved on public datasets. In the application of smart phones, the decoding operation is reduced by positioning the barcode area and the recognition time is decreased by 26.1% on average, which meets the needs of practical applications better.

Keywords

• image processing
• edges extracting
• edge-based expansion
• radon transform
• barcode locating