I have done some research on barcode scanners available for iOS/Android and found ZXing framework to be a reliable free scanner SDK for auto-focus camera devices only(is this right?). My requirement is to scan a barcode on iOS/Android devices and the following operations should be performed:
Capture the barcode image and use a Barcode scanner SDK (like zxing) to scan the image and decode some details(like name, age and other personal details) from the barcode(I understand 2D barcodes formats like QR code are required for this purpose). Firstly is this possible and what will be the performance, speed, accuracy in this case?
But more importantly our customer has to design such barcode for us to decode(without any internet connectivity, all the details should be embedded in the barcode). Is this possible and if so are there any specific frameworks available, what are the essentials for such a framework?
Any help, useful links will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Not sure about performance, speed and accuracy, but they'll be about the same as existing barcode scanner apps, since ZXing is a widely-used framework. You're right about needing a 2D barcode for that amount of data; bear in mind that the more data you encode into a 2D barcode, the harder it will be for a barcode reader to recognise.
ZXing can do this for you as well. zxing.appspot.com has the same code the ZXing website uses to generate barcodes. Just write an app that incorporates that and you're good to go. You can put any data you want into a 2D barcode, so it'll be up to you as to how you format that data. There are some existing formats (like vcards and web links), but it sounds like you want a custom format.
The easiest thing would be to have a look at the ZXing barcode reader app. Pretty much everything you want to do has already been done, and the Apache license is pretty permissive.
Related
I am working on an app that requires the use of a camera to scan in text. Basically without getting too detailed, I need to point the camera at something (for my purposes here I will say a license plate) and i need to point the camera at the plate, and have it somehow save the digits into a string within the app. i guess its similar to Word Lens or red laser where it doesnt actually take a picture, it just scans the view and returns information. i have not been able to find much about this so any help on how to write this kind of code would be greatly appreciated!!
This is not barcode scanning. This is called OCR (optical character recognition), and there are some free and opensource libraries available that do this.
For example, Tesseract is a complete OCR engine written in C++ (it has a C++ interface, so it can be easily used from within an iOS app).
The other solution is gocr, the GNU Optical Character Recognizer. This is supposed to be a standalone program (a command line tool), but I've had success extracting its essential parts into a library (and I used it in an iOS project of mine as well).
OpenCV is a complete computer vision library. You can implement OCR using it - just google for the adequate documentation and tutorials.
2 questions about the open-source, zxing barcode scanner.
A) Can I customise the design of the scan overlay/viewport on the iOS? Ie: change the square/overlay/cancel button etc.
If so, how, or is there documentation?
B) Can zxing scan 1D product barcodes on iOS yet? I can't seem to find documentation on this? Otherwise what are my options for scanning both QR codes and barcodes with the iOS?
Thank you.
Martin
Yes, you can make the source code do whatever you want, as it's open source. You can certainly customize what it looks like.
Yes, most of the 1D scanning code has been ported to C++ in this project. You can enable and use it.
I wanted to write an Android and/or an iPhone app that entails taking a picture of something (right now, I just want to limit to text) after which the app parses the text to make use of it. For example, perhaps taking picture of a sentence (or may be just fragments) will be then parsed by the app to bring up more information about the book. Title, author, ISBN etc. And even may be information about other books that are similar in content to this book.
Is this possible to do something like this? Is there an API that exists already that parses the content of an image? How is an image stored in Android and iPhone? Is it possible to implement the app in one platform and not the other?
I'd appreciate any input or advice that you guys have to offer. Thank you!
You're looking for this, possibly.
It's called OCR, or Optical Character Recognition.
Also check out ZXing a great library for decoding one- and two-dimensional barcodes. There are both iPhone and Android versions.
I wanted to ask how does Bar code recognition apps works (like Goggles)?
Where do they get the bar code information?
There are a variety of standard formats for barcodes. Typically, a barcode app will (somehow) apply some image processing to determine which kind of barcode it's looking at, and then interpret the image accordingly. Figuring out which kind of barcode boils down to making an educated guess based on some set of heuristics.
Once you know which kind of barcode you're working with, it's much easier to process it.
See also: QR Code#Standards.
Google Goggles and Google Shopper use a (modified) version of the ZXing library for barcode scanning. Not surprising as it is all from Google. The barcode data comes from internal sources and from sites on the web.
Just a quick question on the iphone technology within this business card reader
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8z6pcxdrPo
as we can see this video allows users to take a photo of a business card, i have an idea where i would take a photo of some text , and that photo could then be turned into text on the iphone. how would i be able to implement this using the iOS API ?
cheers guys
The camera stuff is all standard-- use the UIImagePickerController for this.
Text recognition (OCR) is not a built in part of the iOS API, though, so that part really isn't trivial. There are multiple open-source projects that can handle this sort of thing if you want to go after them.
Tesseract is an older but possibly viable one. Check out this post which has info on cross compiling it for iOS.
Other users here might have more current recommendations.