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May 06, 2005

A barcode is a wonderful thing

A project we are working on right now has Optix using barcodes to obtain indexing information. A custom module was written for this task due to the nature of the clients problem to be solved.

A set of documents in the system may contain many barcodes. The custom module will scan across all pages finding all barcodes. These barcodes may have many different meanings, so all barcodes that are found must be validated. We do this by looking at the formatting of the data in the barcode. For example, a social security number looks like 333-44-5555. Then, we also query a database to make sure that data exists in the database. Once all information is validated the record is indexed with as much of this data as possible.

If all the information is not found the record is sent to an "exception" queue for processing by personnel.

Barcode recognition has proven to be much more reliable than the favorite alternative: Zone OCR. We have been amazed by the ability of the barcode scanning software to pick up barcodes at different angles (even upside down), bad quality scans such as faxes and any other distortions that can be made to them.

For this customer, this feature will save a great deal of time and money.

Are barcodes in your future?

Posted by Sarel Botha on May 6, 2005 08:26 AM

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