Real-time barcode detection in the wild

Abstract

The linear 1D barcode is the main tagging system for billions of products sold each day. Barcodes have many advantages but require a laser scanner for fast and robust scanning. Solutions exist to read barcodes from cell phones but they assume a carefully framed image within the field of view. This undermines the true potential of barcodes in a wide range of scenarios. In this paper we present a real time technique to detect barcodes in the wild from video streams. Our technique outperforms the state-of-the-art passive techniques both in accuracy and speed. Potential commercial applications enabled by such passive scanning system are also discussed in this paper.