Bar code identification: Poor quality ink jet bar code and characters

Electronic Component with Bar Code

This sample application demonstrates the power of NeuroCheck's integrated concept as opposed to "dumb" special purpose machines. Of course you can use a low-price scanner for identifying a bar code, but as you can see from the image, NeuroCheck can handle bar codes of quite poor quality without problems. And in addition to bar code reading it can do a lot of things a scanner simply is not capable of: perform preprocessing on the image, compute properties of image objects, send position parameters to a robot control system and in this case read characters.

The image shows an electronic component on a circuit board. Clicking the image loads the bar code section of the image in full size and full gray-scale resolution.

Not only is NeuroCheck able to read the poorly printed bar code without any problems, it can also use the bar code as a position reference for the characters. The bar code, seen as a single image object, is very easy to find. NeuroCheck is able to compute the position and orientation of this whole group of black lines with very high precision and use this as a reference for regions of interest used to identify the printed characters and digits below the bar code.


Bar code identification


The image shows the final processing stage with the classification results for the first two characters. As you can see, NeuroCheck identifies the characters with remarkable certainty. And now compare the few steps required to solve this application in NeuroCheck with the programming effort required for realizing such an application with an image processing library - and keep in mind that, in addition to the image processing functionality you see here, NeuroCheck offers a powerful Windows user-interface, parallel and serial communication, visualization, standard file format output... without any extra effort!


Click here to see an animation of the processing steps in NeuroCheck for this application.