Anyone know of an opensource Barcode reader for Delphi, that reads barcodes from a webcam?
Update: Thanks for all the help. I found that purchasing a cheap barcode scanner was much more efficient :) .
A:
Webcams don't read barcodes, AFAIK. Barcode scanners do. Webcams capture images.
What you're looking for is some sort of OCR that will interpret a barcode from an image, and I haven't heard of anything like that at all. You might look at some of the image libraries that are out there that support OCR, but I suspect you're in for a lot of work.
EDIT: I stand corrected. Seems I'm a little outdated on my knowledge of barcodes. It's always nice to learn something new. :-)
Ken White
2009-02-15 17:12:50
Hi Ken, quite a few bits of software use webcams to read barcodes for home software, then the software can look up stuff on the web based on the number. People have webcams they dont have usb scanners.
Toby Allen
2009-02-15 17:19:38
Thanks for the correction. Guess my barcode knowledge is slightly out of date; it has been a year or so since I dealt with them from a code standpoint.
Ken White
2009-02-15 17:23:09
+1
A:
You need a webcam with a good resolution for reading barcodes. If you know how to call C/C++ code from delphi, you should look into the zebra barcode reader.
Richard J. Terrell
2009-02-15 17:14:22
A:
its is possible, barcodepedia have flash reader that reads barcodes from a webcam.
but looking at the site it looks like they are not into giving away the reader.
something that keeps coming up in google is Eym Barcode Reader which is an ActiveX/OCX
Christopher Chase
2009-02-15 23:25:04
I found that, you can embed it in your own website, its in flash though. He seems to be givign the source of the flash app though.
Toby Allen
2009-02-16 00:13:31
+1
A:
I use dtk barcode sdk from http://www.dtksoft.com/. It is neither free nor open source though so it may not fit your needs. It comes as a dll and it was easy to write a delphi wrapper around it.
Basically, you pass it a file (image or pdf) and it returns the number and contents of the barcodes in the file.
SeanX
2009-02-16 19:41:58
A:
Here's one that's a DLL/ActiveX(albeit not free) that apparently comes with an example that reads from a webcam. There's also a free command line version but it's not quite as feature rich. Haven't used it, but it's been on my radar for a while.
http://www.inspirant.de/index.php?ref=prodinbarcodeocr&lg=en
Colin
CDM
2009-03-23 20:56:43