Mobile barcode scanner for iOS/Android

2
votes

I have done some research on barcode scanners available for iOS/Android and found ZXing framework to be a reliable free scanner SDK for auto-focus camera devices only(is this right?). My requirement is to scan a barcode on iOS/Android devices and the following operations should be performed:

  1. Capture the barcode image and use a Barcode scanner SDK (like zxing) to scan the image and decode some details(like name, age and other personal details) from the barcode(I understand 2D barcodes formats like QR code are required for this purpose). Firstly is this possible and what will be the performance, speed, accuracy in this case?

  2. But more importantly our customer has to design such barcode for us to decode(without any internet connectivity, all the details should be embedded in the barcode). Is this possible and if so are there any specific frameworks available, what are the essentials for such a framework?

Any help, useful links will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

1
zxingbarcode-scanner

1 Answers

3
votes

  1. Not sure about performance, speed and accuracy, but they'll be about the same as existing barcode scanner apps, since ZXing is a widely-used framework. You're right about needing a 2D barcode for that amount of data; bear in mind that the more data you encode into a 2D barcode, the harder it will be for a barcode reader to recognise.

  2. ZXing can do this for you as well. zxing.appspot.com has the same code the ZXing website uses to generate barcodes. Just write an app that incorporates that and you're good to go. You can put any data you want into a 2D barcode, so it'll be up to you as to how you format that data. There are some existing formats (like vcards and web links), but it sounds like you want a custom format.

The easiest thing would be to have a look at the ZXing barcode reader app. Pretty much everything you want to do has already been done, and the Apache license is pretty permissive.