GPU-accelerated joint 1D and 2D barcode localization on smartphones

The built-in cameras and powerful processors have turned smartphones into ubiquitous barcode scanners. In smartphone-based barcode scanning, barcode localization is an important preprocessing step that quickly scans the entire camera image and passes barcode candidates to the actual decoder. This paper presents the implementation steps of a robust joint 1D and 2D barcode localization algorithm on the mobile GPU. The barcode probability maps are derived from the structure matrix and the color of the individual pixels. The different steps of the localization algorithm are formulated as OpenGL ES 2.0 fragment shaders and both 1D and 2D barcode saliency maps are computed directly on the graphics hardware. The presented method can detect barcodes at various scales and orientations at 6 frames per second in HD resolution images on current generation smartphones.