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Stabilization and extraction of 2D barcodes for camera phones

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Abstract

With the ubiquity of cellular phones, mobile applications with 2D barcodes have drawn a lot of attentions in recent years. When a user takes a barcode image with the camera in a mobile device, the captured image tends to be blurred due to camera shaking when the user presses the shutter. In addition, the captured image includes part of the complex background of the page with the barcode. In this paper, we point out that the above two issues, which have not been identified in previous works, deteriorate the accuracy of barcode recognition in the mobile computing. We then propose an efficient and effective algorithm to restore and extract 2D barcode from a complex background in a camera-shaken image. Compared with previous approaches, our algorithm outperforms in not only smaller running time but also higher accuracy of the barcode recognition in the mobile computing.

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Notes

  1. The noise is random additive noise. The Gaussian white noise is a special case of random additive noise. In most cases, since the blur is generally much more significant than the noise, we can adopt the Gaussian white noise to model the noise for simplicity [29].

  2. Since the frequency response of PSF contains very small values, the small noise is greatly emphasized in the frequency domain, where \(\frac{1}{F(h(i,j))}\) is very large [26].

  3. The regularization parameter λ controls the degree of smoothness (i.e., degree of bias) of the solution, and is usually small. Analytical methods for choosing an optimal parameter λ are discussed in [39].

  4. Hadamard [12] defined ill-posed problems whose solution does not exist or it is not unique or it if is not stable under perturbations on data, it was with the intent of saving mathematicians and computational scientists substantial time and trouble.

  5. In fact, the inverse of the block-Toeplitz matrix H almost exists [45].

  6. In this paper, the accuracy is defined as the number of successfully decoded barcodes over the total number of testing images.

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Acknowledgments

The work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, ROC, under Contracts NSC 96-2628-E-002-038-MY3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Multimedia Design, National Taichung Institute of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC

    Chung-Hua Chu

  2. Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    De-Nian Yang & Ming-Syan Chen

  3. Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Ya-Lan Pan & Ming-Syan Chen

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  1. Chung-Hua Chu
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Correspondence to Chung-Hua Chu.

Additional information

Communicated by Changsheng Xu.

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Chu, CH., Yang, DN., Pan, YL. et al. Stabilization and extraction of 2D barcodes for camera phones. Multimedia Systems 17, 113–133 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-010-0206-9

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