Barcode Readers using the Camera Device in Mobile Phones

Abstract

This paper shows new algorithms and the implementations of image reorganization for EAN/QR barcodes in mobile phones. The mobile phone system used here consists of a camera, mobile application processor, digital signal processor (DSP), and display device, and the source image is captured by the embedded camera device. The introduced algorithm is based on the code area found by four corners detection for 2D barcode and spiral scanning for 1D barcode using the embedded DSP. This algorithm is robust for practical situations and the DSP has good enough performance for the real-time recognition of the codes. The performance of our image processing is 66.7 frames/sec for EAN code and 14.1 frames/sec for QR code image processing, and this is sufficient performance for practical use. The released mobile phone had performance of 5-10 frames/sec including OS and subsystem overheads.