Could you post a little more information on how you could see ICEpdf helping you with Barcode recognition?

Excuse my bad english...

Barcodes on documents to be used for the automatic processing of scanned documents. Many document management systems use this technic. Recognition of key-elements with barcodes instead of simple text is much safer.

Some examples:

Archiving Delivery notes, which are signed. The delivery note will be printed with a barcode (delivery no.). After signing from the consignee, the signed delivery note with the barcode is scanned and automatically assigned to the delivery in the database and archived.

Incoming invoice. The invoices will be provided at accounting-time with a barcode (the booking-number) on the first sheet. Many Invoices will then be scanned in a stack, separated by the barcode on the first sheet of each invoic and archived with the accouning-number.
Together with text recognition and clever logic, even the accounting of the invoices can be further automated.

There isn't much in the way of specific barcode support. The is mention of a "barcodePlainText" attribute on a form object which is used to store plain text version of the barcode data. This attribute would have to be written when the PDF was generated.

Alternately form a work flow point of view it would be possible to extract document images and set them as source for a barcode reading API. Once a barcode was successfully read the business logic could be executed.

Is there a specific feature request that you would like to see in ICEpdf to aid in barcode reading?

What we need is the second one, something like the commerical product http://www.accusoft.com/barcodexpress.htm for PDF documents.

I have tried extracting the images and then reading it with ZXing from Google, but it didn't work. I think its depents on the barcode reading API but i didn't found a (free) better one.

Would it be possible to attach sample PDF that has a barcode on it. It maybe possible to improve the image quality of the captured page or extracted image to enable correct bar code scanning.

Hi Patrick,

thank you for the support. I have attached a test document with some barcodes. The barcode are in CODE128 format.

Gruss
Martin

Thanks for the posting the file. I gave it look this morning and interestingly enough the Cannon capture is storing the page as four separate images. There is a noticeable quality difference in the 72 and 84 set and the 48, 82 and 88 set. However I used our ICEmobile QR code scanning component on my android phone and it actually captured all 5 of the bar codes on the page but this was done manually. The QR code uses the code.google.com/p/zxing library.

Using my phone I was able to pick where each bar code was on the page. From work flow point of view is there anyway of saving the PDF so that the bar codes are actually stored as separate images in the file instead of being part of a larger image?

I think there a four separate images to save bytes. The scanmodus is set to auto to recognize if the document is color, grayscale, black/white etc. It seems that the scan software separates the different colormodels in different images to save bytes.

This scan was made with a special (and expensive) document scanner. This scanner (in combination with the software) has build in support for detecting barcodes. This is not only a software function because it doesn't work with all (Canon) scanners. It is not possible to separate the bar codes in separate images, there is no option in the software to do this.

We would like to use any scanner who can generate PDF-Files to work with barcodes. I attached to more files. One scanned with a sharp multifunction printer (AR-M276) and one sending as a fax but I think the quality of the fax would be to bad to recognize barcodes.

I know it is the "hard work" to find where the barcodes are in the image but this is what we (and mostly other) needs.

An example has been added to svn that show how to capture and extract bar-code data using the zing library. The example can be found at http://anonsvn.icesoft.org/repo/icepdf/trunk/icepdf/examples/extraction/barcode/