Zxing Algorithm in Decoding Linear Barcodes

[April]

Hi I'm doing a study regarding decoding barcode images and I was just wondering what algorithm does Zxing use in decoding linear barcode images such as EAN-13? I found a lot of algorithms in decoding like using deformable templates, generalized learning vector quantization and fast hough transformation approximation. I found a post here regarding the algorithm used in decoding QR codes so how about linear barcodes?

[Sean Owen]

Nothing so fancy at all, it is just binarizing and reading the input data directly. You can get better performance with a smart edge detector. On a mobile device, you quickly still run into a wall of limit processing time. If looking for several formats, anything needs to take under, say, 50ms, which isn't often enough time to do something like a general Hough transform. You can send to a server, but the round trip time (not to mention connectivity issue) is large. These are the right ideas for a research paper or desktop algorithm, and I bet one can be made fast for runtime. as-is, they usually aren't directly suitable.