Reading barcodes from within an image?

I need to build some functionality into my application to easily import documents into the software application. I can automatically scan the documents into PDF or TIFF format. Each document has a barcode on it in a fixed location. I need a way to read this barcode from within the scanned document so that I know how to deal with the document within my software. I'm pretty open to ways of doing this. I don't know if there is some application available that I could hook into that would already do this. The concept is to make it as automated as possible as we will need to scan hundreds of documents a day, which makes scanning the barcodes with a standard barcode scanner and then scanning the document unreasonable.

Can anyone point me in a good direction to start. I've been doing some searches, but I haven't found anything that seems like it might work. I'm pretty open to platform and programming language. Thanks.

I think any robust pre-existing software that converts scanned images to barcode values is proprietary and expensive. If you do have cash to spend, then your options may be increased. I'll take it then that you want to actually program such software.

When you scan a document, you'll have to select the barcode portion of the image. Hopefully, all the barcodes are in a fixed position of each document, and there is a bit of whitespace around them.

Once the barcode portion is selected, you'll have interpret the barcode. This is where the trouble is. Unlike generated images, scanned barcodes can have noise, distortions, and other artifacts. Barcodes are made up of black and white lines, but your scanned image isn't going to have such high levels of contrast. Your white will actually be slightly gray of perhaps off-color and your black won't be pure black. Effectively, your program is going to have to guess intelligently for each barcode, and can occcasionally read it wrong. A good algorithm combined with filters, and perhaps a trainable AI like a neural network can give you a high rate of success in interpeting the barcodes.

You'll most likely want to generate a grayscale histogram of your barcode through image manipulation. Then run your AI tuned algorithm on the histogram to extract the interpeted values.

Once interpreted, you'll have to first verify that the barcode is actually a valid barcode. Barcodes have signatures in them, like 111 and the beginning and end, and you should first look for the signature. Then you can extract the actual value.

Your programming language and platform of choice needs to have image manipulation capabilities. There's a few free and open source libraries that may be worth exploring. Most modern and mainstream programming languages either have bindings to the image libraries or have some sort of imaging toolkit. C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET, and Python are all valid choices. The rest of the program is generic algorithms not specific to either language or platform.

thanks for your thoughts. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to develop something in house. I usually look to open source projects first, but in this case, I don't mind paying for proprietary software as long as it works well. I do need something that I can integrate with my current application though, so command line processing or a good API is a must. So far the closest thing I've found is this, which might work, I've emailed them for a demo. That software might be a little steep in price, but at least it's along the line of what I'm looking for. If I can get a reliable process working based on it I could probably get the boss man to spend the green. I'm still open to other options though...

Hello,

how much are you looking to spend? Do you need post implementation support? What level of integration into your application is needed if barcode solution provider can provide the software development services?

Kind regards,
Anil
anaicker@chrome8.com