Full Project – Development of a barcode reader and generator for Android devices

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CHAPTER ONE

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The barcode was invented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver and patented in the US in 1951 .The invention was based on Morse code(lourer, 2019) that was extended to thin and thick bars. However, it took over twenty years before this invention become commercially successful.

A barcode often refers to (machine-readable information) that can be easily stored, transferred and processed. A barcode have the capability to improve the productivity and reliability of almost all applications as they are printed and processed by machines(Roberts, 2019) . Barcodes are build with the ability to processed data quickly and also with high tendency of accuracy than human data entry.

In a nutshell, a barcode is a process of encoding information into a visual pattern (those black lines and white spaces) that a machine (a barcode scanner) can read.

The combination of black and white bars (also referred to as elements) represents different types of text characters that follow a pre-established algorithm for that barcode (more on the types of barcodes later)(Selmeier, 2020, pp. 26,214) . A barcode scanner read the pattern of black and white bars and translates them into a line of text that your retail point of sale system can understand.

A barcode provide inexpensive method and simple way of presenting variety of commercial data, and also improve mobile user experience.

The barcode technology has been further developed such as the ‘2D barcode’ with the creation of barcodes to increase the data capacity of barcodes. With the integration of cameras in many mobile phones, this mobile phones act as scanners, barcode readers and portable data storages and maintaining network connectivity if required(ISO, 2021). When used together with such camera phones, barcodes work as a tag to connect the digital and physical world.

One of the challenging problems of pervasive computing is to link a physical object with digital information because many of the pervasive computing applications require manual inputs or complex image processing to obtain information related to a real object( National Film Board of Canada., 2021). The use of barcodes helps eliminates such processing to acquire the needed information.

Our approach integrates the capabilities of 1D barcode to represent and encode the complex digital information collected from different sources. This research, aim to develop a barcode scanner and generator that run on android handheld devices which has image processing and barcode decoding capabilities to address the above-mentioned problem.

1.2 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Over the years, many applications are developed in home automation area assisting especially elderly and people with special needs in their daily life. One of the primary concerns for elderly is how technology can assist them in buying food items and medicines as well as notify them about what to take. Moreover, the information must be easily accessible anytime from anywhere. Generally, cell phone is the best platform to create applications that can handle such kind of information. Since cell phone is portable and easy to handle, almost everyone carries it and thus can be easily used by elderly people. This opens a new doorway of applications, which focuses on providing healthcare related information on cell phone. Since barcodes can carry a lot of information either by referring to the source of information or by encoding all the information in it, they are used in several applications like point of sale, inventory control, shipping, packaging and data collection. Medical and dental practices rely on complex patient forms and barcodes can help in entering the detailed information in the computer, making it an easy task of gathering large amount of information. It also reduces data collection costs and better services are the results.

1.3 POTENTIAL APPLICATION

There are many uses of such system, out of which some of them are implemented as functionalities provided by the system and some can be added to the existing system:

One of the most important applications of the system is in grocery shopping. It can assist people in making decision about what to buy and what not. When a user goes to a grocery shop, he can scan the barcode on the grocery item and store it in the cell phone. We implemented the above functionality by allowing the user to store the images of the barcodes. He can scan more than one barcode, store it and then use this application to decode and parse all the images stored. The user will then get a list of all the barcodes that he scanned. He can click on one of the barcodes to see the information available from the barcode. For example, it will list the ingredients of the food item and then he can check whether he is allergic to such item or not. He can also check if any of those is in conflict with other food items that can lead to some ailments or disease. Moreover, the user can also access the current price at the grocery store other than the price mentioned in the barcode. He can also calculate the total price of all the items he puts in the cart before buying so that he would know the total cost before going to the billing counter. He can remove some of the items in case if the total price exceeds his budget.
Another possible usage of the application can be in buying medicines. Currently the system does not implement this but it can be added to the system without a lot of change in the code.
Another application is in saving the contacts to the address book of cell phone and knowing the image formats of all the images that are decoded.
Other applications include calling the phone number if the information encoded inside the barcode shows telephone number, asking the user to generate a calendar event to notify if the encoded information is of calendar event type.
Another benefit is that one can think of some more applications and can add them as a part of the overall system. Especially those applications can be easily added which may not require Internet access and can embed 1D data inside barcode just as we did in grocery shopping application. Moreover, one can also encode more complex text information inside the barcode and use the system for decoding it. Since we also propose the way to encode such information in this project, one can easily use this mechanism to encode more and more complex information in a certain format.

1.4 AIM AND OBJECTIVES

It is aimed at this project to develop a barcode scanner and generator application for android devices that provides a generic way to access any kind of text information encoded inside 1D and 2D barcodes.

It will also differentiate the information encoded inside the barcode depending on its content type. The system is designed with the following objectives:

To show the information barcode encoded and how that information can be put to use in the application context.
To illustrate how one can make several applications centered on 2D and barcodes and also assist people in making decisions, information analyses and data comparisons.
To implement how a barcode can be used to encode information of any product.
To test and validate the system.
5 CONTRIBUTIONS

The main contributions of the system are:

Existing solutions do not integrate the capabilities of 1D and barcodes, nor take advantage of all the capabilities like high data density, on site data collection, no manual input entry of a barcode
Our solution takes advantage of barcodes to handle not only simple but also complex text information by defining its format that can be used for encoding, differentiating the information based on its content type
Our technique presents a method to handle information from various sources, process the information to present meaningful result for decision-making on cell phone platform which is portable and compact.

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