Barcode Applications

WHAT IS A BARCODE?

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows certain data on certain products. Originally, barcodes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1D (1 dimensional) barcodes or symbologies. They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2D (2 dimensional) matrix codes or symbologies. Although 2D systems use symbols other than bars, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers, or scanned from an image by special software.

The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task in which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread to many other roles as well, tasks that are generically referred to as Auto ID Data Capture (AIDC). Other systems are attempting to make inroads in the AIDC market, but the simplicity, universality and low cost of barcodes has limited the role of these other systems. It costs 0.5¢ (U.S) to implement a barcode, while passive RFID still costs about 30¢ per tag.

HOW ARE BARCODES USED?

Barcodes such as the UPC have become a ubiquitous element of modern civilization. Some modern applications of barcodes include:

Almost every item purchased from a grocery store, department store, and mass merchandiser has a UPC barcode on it This greatly helps in keeping track of a large number of items in a store and also reduces instances of shoplifting involving price tag swapping, although shoplifters can now print their own barcodes. Since the adoption of barcodes, both consumers and retailers have benefited from the savings generated.

Barcodes are widely used in shop floor control applications software where employees can scan work orders and enter the time spent on a job.

Retail chain membership cards (issued mostly by grocery stores and specialty "big box" retail stores such as sporting equipment, office supply, or pet stores) use bar codes to uniquely identify a consumer. Retailers benefit by being able to offer customized marketing and greater understanding of individual consumer shopping patterns. Shoppers typically get special offers at the point of sale (coupons, product discounts) or special marketing offers through the address or e-mail address provided at registration.

Example of barcode on a patient identification wristband

When used on patient identification, barcodes permit clinical staff to instantly access a wealth of vital patient data, including medical history, allergy warnings and other potentially life-saving medical information.

Document Management tools often allow for barcoded sheets to facilitate the separation and indexing of documents that have been imaged in batch scanning applications.
Bar code
Barcoded parcel sent from Ukraine

The tracking of item movement, including rental cars, airline luggage, nuclear waste, mail, express mail and parcels.

In 2003 Paul Hebert suggested using bar coding techniques for organization of species. The barcode assigned is based on the CO1 gene.

Since 2005, airlines use an IATA-standard 2D barcode on boarding passes ( BCBP), and since 2008 2D barcodes sent to mobile phones enable electronic boarding passes.

Recently, researchers have placed tiny barcodes on individual bees to track the insects' mating habits.

Entertainment event tickets can have barcodes that need to be validated before allowing the holder to enter sports arenas, cinemas, theatres, fairgrounds, transportation etc. This can allow the proprietor to identify duplicate or fraudulent tickets more easily.

Used on automobiles, can be located on front or back.

Joined with in-motion checkweighers to identify the item being weighed in a conveyor line for data collection

Some 2D barcodes embed a hyperlink to a web page. A capable cellphone might be used to read the barcode and browse the linked website.

In the 1970s and 1980s, software source code was occasionally encoded in a barcode and printed on paper. Cauzin Softstrip and Paperbyteare barcode symbologies specifically designed for this application.

The 1991 Barcode Battler computer game system, which used any standard barcode to generate combat statistics.

1992, Veterans Health Administration developed Bar Code Medication Administration system (BCMA).

In the 21st century many artists started using barcodes in art, such as Scott Blake's Barcode Jesus, as part of the post-modernism movement.

Today, barcodes are issued by GS1, the most widely used supply chain standards system in the world.

Barcode Symbology

The mapping between messages and barcodes is called a symbology. The specification of a symbology includes the encoding of the single digits/characters of the message as well as the start and stop markers into bars and space, the size of the quiet zone required to be before and after the barcode as well as the computation of a checksum.

Linear symbologies can be classified mainly by two properties:

Continuous vs. discrete: Characters in continuous symbologies usually abut, with one character ending with a space and the next beginning with a bar, or vice versa. Characters in discrete symbologies begin and end with bars; the intercharacter space is ignored, as long as it is not wide enough to look like the code ends.

Two-width vs. many-width: Bars and spaces in two-width symbologies are wide or narrow; how wide a wide bar is exactly has no significance as long as the symbology requirements for wide bars are adhered to (usually two to three times wider than a narrow bar). Bars and spaces in many-width symbologies are all multiples of a basic width called the module; most such codes use four widths of 1, 2, 3 and 4 modules.

Some symbologies use interleaving. The first character is encoded using black bars of varying width. The second character is then encoded, by varying the width of the white spaces between these bars. Thus characters are encoded in pairs over the same section of the barcode. Interleaved 2 of 5 is an example of this.

Stacked symbologies consist of a given linear symbology repeated vertically in multiple.

There is a large variety of 2D symbologies. The most common are matrix codes, which feature square or dot-shaped modules arranged on a grid pattern. 2-D symbologies also come in a variety of other visual formats. Aside from circular patterns, there are several 2-D symbologies which employ steganography by hiding an array of different-sized or -shaped modules within a user-specified image (for example, DataGlyphs).

Linear symbologies are optimized to be read by a laser scanner, which sweeps a beam of light across the barcode in a straight line, reading a slice of the barcode light-dark patterns. In the 1990s development of CCD imagers to read barcodes was pioneered by Welch Allyn. Imaging does not require moving parts, like a laser scanner does. In 2007, linear imaging was surpassing laser scanning as the preferred scan engine for its performance and durability.
Stacked symbologies are also optimized for laser scanning, with the laser making multiple passes across the barcode.

2-D symbologies cannot be read by a laser as there is typically no sweep pattern that can encompass the entire symbol. They must be scanned by an image-based scanner employing a charge coupled device (CCD) or other digital camera sensor technology.

Barcode Readers and Barcode Scanners

The earliest, and still the cheapest, barcode scanners are built from a fixed light and a single photosensor that is manually "scrubbed" across the barcode.

Barcode scanners can be classified into three categories based on their connection to thecomputer. The older type is the RS-232 barcode scanner. This type requires special programming for transferring the input data to the application program. Another type connects between a computer and its PS/2 or AT keyboard by the use of an adaptor cable. The third type is the USB barcode scanner, which is a more modern and more easily installed device than the RS-232 scanner. Like the keyboard interface scanner, this has the advantage that it does not need any code or program for transferring input data to the application program; when you scan the barcode its data is sent to the computer as if it had been typed on the keyboard.

Barcode Verifiers and Barcode Standards

Barcode verifiers are primarily used by businesses that print and use barcodes. Any trading partner in the supply chain can test barcode quality. It is important to "grade" a barcode to ensure that any reader in the supply chain can successfully interpret a bar code with a low error rate. Retailers levy large fines and penalties for non-compliant barcodes.

Barcode verifiers work like a readers, but instead of simply decoding a barcode, a verifier performs a series of eight tests. Each test is given a grade from 0.0 to 4.0 (F to A) and the lowest of any of the tests is the scan grade. For most applications a 2.5 (C) grade is the minimum acceptable grade.

Compared with a reader, a verifier measures a barcode. The measurement must be repeatable and consistent. Doing so requires constant conditions such as distance, illumination angle, sensor angle and aperture of the verifier. In comparison, a reader must interpret a barcode as reliably as possible over a wide range of conditions.

Barcodes should make processes faster, more reliable and less costly. High-quality printing and accurate reading are both essential for the best savings, compared to other methods.

Benefits Of Barcoding

In point-of-sale management, the use of barcodes can provide very detailed up-to-date information on key aspects of the business, enabling decisions to be made much more quickly and with more confidence. For example:

Fast-selling items can be identified quickly and automatically reordered to meet consumer demand, Slow-selling items can be identified, preventing a build-up of unwanted stock, The effects of repositioning a given product within a store can be monitored, allowing fast-moving more profitable items to occupy the best space, Historical data can be used to predict seasonal fluctuations very accurately. Items may be repriced on the shelf to reflect both sale prices and price increases. This technology also enables the profiling of individual consumers, typically through a voluntary registration of discount cards. While pitched as a benefit to the consumer, this practice is considered to be potentially dangerous by privacy advocates.

Besides sales and inventory tracking, barcodes are very useful in shipping/receiving/tracking. When a manufacturer packs a box with any given item, a Unique Identifying Number (UID) can be assigned to the box. A relational database can be created to relate the UID to relevant information about the box; such as order number, items packed, qty packed, final destination, etc.

The information can be transmitted through a communication system such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) so the retailer has the information about a shipment before it arrives.

Shipments that are sent to a Distribution Center (DC) are tracked before being forwarded to the final destination. When the shipment gets to the final destination, the UID gets scanned, so the store knows where the order came from, what's inside the box, and how much to pay the manufacturer.

The reason barcodes are business-friendly is that the scanners are relatively low cost and extremely accurate compared to key-entry, with only about 1 substitution error in 15,000 to 36 trillion characters entered. The exact error rate depends on the type of barcode.

BARCODE SYMBOLOGY -

Here are popular barcode symbologies.

If you would like information on symbologies not listed here contact The Barcode Lady in St. Louis Missouri, at 800-827-9695.

1) Universal Product Code (UPC) is a barcode symbology (i.e., a specific type of barcode), that is widely used in Canada and the United States for tracking trade items in stores.
Barcode

The UPC encodes 12 decimal digits as SLLLLLLMRRRRRRE, where S (start) and E (end) are the bit pattern 101, M (middle) is the bit pattern 01010 (called guard bars), and each L (left) and R (right) are digits, each one represented by a seven-bit code. This is a total of 95 bits. The bit pattern for each numeral is designed to be as little like the others as possible, and to have no more than four consecutive 1s or 0s in order. Both are for reliability in scanning.

Since S, M, and E all include two bars, and each of the 12 digits of the UPC-A barcode consists of two bars and two spaces, all UPC-A barcodes consist of exactly (3 × 2) + (12 × 2) = 30 bars.

The UPC has only numerals, with no letters or other characters. The first digit L is the prefix. The last digit R is an error correcting check digit, allowing some errors in scanning or manual entry to be detected. UPC data structures are a component of GTINs (Global Trade Item Numbers). All of these data structures follow the global GS1 standards

2) Code 39 (also known as "USS Code 39", "Code 3/9", "Code 3 of 9", "USD-3", "Alpha39", "Type 39") is a variable length, discrete barcode symbology.
The Code 39 specification defines 43 characters, consisting of uppercase letters (A through Z), numeric digits (0 through 9) and a handful of special characters (-, ., $, /, +, %, and space). An additional character (denoted '*') is used for both start and stop delimiters. Each character is composed of nine elements: five bars and four spaces. Three of the nine elements in each character are wide (binary value 1), and six elements are narrow (binary value 0). The width ratio between narrow and wide can be chosen between 1:2 and 1:3.
The barcode itself does not contain a check digit (in contrast to—for instance—Code 128), but it can be considered self-checking on the grounds that a single erroneously interpreted bar cannot generate another valid character. Possibly the most serious drawback of Code 39 is its low data density: It requires more space to encode data in Code 39 than, for example, in Code 128. This means that very small goods cannot be labeled with a Code 39 based barcode. However, Code 39 is still widely used and can be decoded with virtually any barcode reader. One advantage of Code 39 is that since there is no need to generate a check digit, it can easily be integrated into existing printing system by adding a barcode font to the system or printer and then printing the raw data in that font.

3) Code 128 is a very high-density barcode symbology. (A special version of it called GS1-128 is used extensively world wide in shipping and packaging industries.) It is used for alphanumeric or numeric-only barcodes. It can encode all 128 characters of ASCII and, by use of an extension character (FNC4), the Latin-1 characters defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1[citation needed]. GS1-128 (formerly known as UCC/EAN-128), not Code 128, is the major component of the labeling standard for GS1 used as product identification for container and pallet levels in the supply chain. The symbology was formerly defined as ISO/IEC 15417:2007.

4) GS1-128 is an application standard of the GS1 implementation using the Code 128 barcode specification. The former correct name was UCC/EAN-128. Other no longer used names have included UCC-128 and EAN-128. GS1-128 uses a series of Application Identifiers to include additional data such as best before dates, batch numbers, quantities, weights and many other attributes needed by the user.

5) QR Code is a matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera, and smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data. Common in Japan, where it was created by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994, the QR code is one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. QR is the abbreviation for Quick Response, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

Barcode Applications

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