| 摘要 |
An efficient method and apparatus (20) for determining the location and approximate orientation of a barcode (33) on a substrate (14). The inventive method is preferably implemented by an omnidirectional barcode locator including an application specific integrated circuit that includes one or mo re field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The digital image is a one-bit (i.e. , black/white) representation of a standard eight-bit grey scale video image produced by a CCD camera (16). The use of a one-bit digital video signal reduces the amount of mass storage memory required to store images of barcod es and facilitates the manipulation of the video signal by the application specific integrated circuit. The omnidirectional barcode locator (20) processes, in real-time, a digital video signal (19) defining a pixelized image (30) of a conveyor (12) carrying parcels (14a-14n) through the field o f view of a CCD camera (16). The omnidirectional barcode locator (20) divides the video image (30) into a plurality of cells and produces two output signals, a cell barcode detection signal (21) and a cell barcode orientation signal (22), for each cell. A host computer (23) responds to a "true" cell barcode detection signal (21) for a cell by storing the portion of the video image (30) corresponding to the cellin a mass storage memory (24). The host computer (30) also stores a representation of the cell barcode orientation signal (22) for each cell in which the cell barcode indication signal (21) i s "true". The omnidirectional barcode locator (20) thus allows the host comput er (30) to store only those cells of the video image (30) that contain barcode data. The barcode data may then be provided to a barcode reader (23) for further processing.
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