1. OVERVIEW

Rapid128 reads Code128 barcodes from bitmap images. It finds its application
mainly in electronic document archiving systems, where it can be used to
determine document identifiers (placed on documents as barcodes) from scans
of customer-signed printouts.
 
Rapid128 is lightweight, does not depend on any external libraries and is
optimized for speed: it can process thousands of images at once, in some
circumstances even directly from disk, not loading them into memory.

Two main issues limiting the scope of usage of rapid128 are: (1) it
reads only Code128 barcodes and (2) while it can handle many barcodes on a
single page, it is optimized for a "hit and run" with whatever code it finds
first.


2. INPUT

rapid128 works on PBM/PPM/PGM images. Files in other formats can be
converted on-the-fly by rapid128, but only using an external converter, such
as one of the utilities from the netpbm package (jpegtopnm, pngtopnm) or
ghostscript.


3. USAGE

$ rapid128 filename.pbm 
Basic usage; note it reads only left-to-right horizontal codes. First found
code is printed on stdout. Handles codes with a minimal feature size
(thinnest bar) between 0.9 ~ 4.0 pixels. 

$ rapid128 -e -ch 48 -lc pngtopnm filename1.png filename2.png filename3.png
PNG file input with extended reporting (extra information in addition to
barcode contents)

$ find . -iname 'rot*.pgm' | xargs rapid128 -ch 48 -e -bs 4 -bt 4.0
  -s IWHO,IWHO/r,IWHO/rr,IWHO/rrr
Batch scanning (4 files at once) with 4 second time limit for every batch.
To speed up, only reads every 48th line of each image, but tries four
different orientations of the barcode (left-to-right, top-to-bottom,
right-to-left and bottom-to-top)

$ /usr/local/bin/rapid128 -s IWHO,IWhO,IwHO,IWHO/rrr -wa 2.0 -wb 4.5 -ch 24
  -lc '/usr/bin/pdfimages -f 1 -l 1 \$\$ <temp> ; cat <temp>-000.pbm
  <temp>-000.pgm <temp>-000.ppm ; rm -f <temp>-000.pgm <temp>-000.ppm
  <temp>-000.pbm' -e -r -bs 4 -bt 4.0 <file>
A sophisticated call used in our document archiving system (optimized
scanner parameters, PDF input, batch processing)

Please consult built-in help (rapid128 -hh) for a detailed explanation of all options.


4. NOTES

Because this program was created for solving a particular task in a very
particular system (see section 6), it is not yet a finished product and stil
needs a lot of testing in various different scenarios. 

Blurring works only in one direction, either horizontal or vertical. Even
though it can be selected automatically depending on image aspect ratio, it
is still a problem when orientations of codes in the dataset are not known.


5. AUTHOR AND LICENSE

All the initially commited code has been written by Mateusz 'mteg' Golicz
<[email protected]>. It is licensed under GPL version 2.


6. BACKGROUND AND PROJECT'S FUTURE

Most work on rapid128 took place during a single weekend. We have this small
digital (scanned) document archiving system that used zbar for the purpose of
barcode identification. We found out that zbar did not read some of the codes,
even though they were perfectly preserved in the scans. Thus I decided to
write our own app to do the job. Funny thing is that in the end, rapid128 
does not read these codes as well. It turned out that there is a bug in TeX
module that renders our codes in the first place (code128.tex) - one of code
symbols is incorrectly defined in the module and thus drawn incorrectly. The
bug only shows up when certain combinations of characters appear in the code
or when checksum has to be encoded using that flawed symbol.

To sum up, I wrote the program to solve a particular task - and right now,
it does the job. I am a busy man and while I can answer a few questions and
make minor improvements on popular demand, I will not be documenting the
program further or developing any major features unless we need them in our
company. Thus, if someone wants to develop the code, make it into a proper
software package with all the seriousness of autoconf and a manual page -
they are free to do it.