Copyright © 2012 Qiang Huang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The 2-D bar code possesses large capacity of data, strong ability for error correction, and high safety, which boosts the 2-D bar code recognition technology being widely used and developed fast. This paper presents a novel algorithm for locating data matrix code based on finder pattern detection and bar code border fitting. The proposed method mainly involves three stages. It first extracts candidate regions that may contain a data matrix code by morphological processing and then locates the data matrix code roughly by detecting “L” finder pattern and the dashed border on the candidate regions. Finally, the lines fitted with the border points are used as the borders of data matrix code. A number of data matrix code images with complexity background are selected for evaluations. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits better performance under complex background and other undesirable conditions.