Week 5 FYP1

Week 5

Date: 07/10/2013 (Monday)

Title: Research and findings

In this week I’m continuing my research about barcodes. This time the research is going into detail and more focusing about the normal barcode and the QR code. 

This project will use two kinds of barcodes which are the Universal Product Code (UPC) and Quick Response Code (QR code).  UPC barcode is basically the normal barcode that printed on the products, while the QR code is ‘pattern’ barcode that usually on some product that normally contain the website of the product. 

UPC Barcode

UPC (Universal Product Code) barcode is the normal barcode that can be seen on any product (usually people refer it as the normal barcode) and it is widely used around the world for tracking trade items in stores. The common form of this barcode is the UPC-A which contains 12 numerical digits which are uniquely assigned to each trade item. 

Each UPC-A barcode consists of a scan-able strip of black bars and white spaces, above a sequence of 12 numerical digits. No letters, characters, or other content of any kind may appear on a standard UPC-A barcode. The digits and bars maintain a one-to-one correspondence - in other words, there is only one way to represent each 12-digit number visually, and there is only one way to represent each visual barcode numerically.

The scan-able area of every UPC-A barcode follows the pattern SLLLLLLMRRRRRRE, where the S (start), M (middle), and E (end) guard bars are represented exactly the same on every UPC and the L (left) and R (right) sections collectively represent the 12 numerical digits that make each UPC unique. The first digit L indicates a particular number system to be used by the following digits. The last digit R is an error detecting check digit that allows some errors in scanning or manual entry to be detected. The non-numerical identifiers, the guard bars, separate the two groups of six digits and establish the timing.

QR Barcode

QR (Quick Response) code is a 2-Dimensional code which was first designed for the automotive industry in Japan. It is becoming popular outside the automotive industry due its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to UPC barcode. QR code is mostly used for product tracking, item identification, time tracking, document management, general marketing and much more. Nowadays, QR barcode that are printed on products stores the information of the product’s website and let the user to go to their website when the user scans it.

A QR code consists of black modules (square dots) arranged in a square grid on a white background, which can be read by an imaging device (such as a camera) and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted; data is then extracted from patterns present in both horizontal and vertical components of the image. 

A QR code is detected by a 2-dimensional digital image sensor and then digitally analyzed by a programmed processor. The processor locates the three distinctive squares at the corners of the QR code image, using a smaller square (or multiple squares) near the fourth corner to normalize the image for size, orientation, and angle of viewing. The small dots throughout the QR code are then converted to binary numbers and validated with an error-correcting code.


Here's a video about QR code :

Here's a video about how the barcode works :