You probably thought nobody used fax anymore. Well think again because it’s still going strong in some sectors. In the case where fax is received directly onto a server then the sending fax machines become remote scanners, and if you combine this with the power of barcodes then you have the capability to file images
With scanned images it is not uncommon to have noisy documents which can produce false readings. However this can be dealt with using Softek’s software through the methods shown below. 1. Turn off barcode types you do not need to read. For example, say the c53e barcode is of type CODABAR and the barcodes
I have now spent quite a while dealing with troublesome images with the Softek Barcode Reader SDK and have found several tricks which solve almost all problems which could arise. The issue is almost always image quality. Poorly scanned colour images or simply a low resolution leading to the bars coming together are often the
There is much confusion about bitmap handles (HBITMAP) and device independent bitmaps (DIB). The terms are often interchanged and functions that you would expect to return a DIB, such as CreateDIBitmap, do in fact return a value of type HBITMAP. HBITMAP’s are handles to memory objects containing a BITMAP structure followed by palette information and
PDF-417 barcodes are a common type of 2-D barcode and are designed to store more data than a 1-D barcode with built in redundancy and error correction. A PDF-417 barcode actually consists of stacks of 1-D barcodes arranged in columns. Each of the 1-D barcodes is called a cluster and has a numeric value. The
We often receive emails asking us to explain why our SDK is unable to decode a barcode from an attached image, and the answer is often that the resolution of the image is too low; but why does image resolution play such an important role in the decoding of a barcode? What is resolution? For
The graph below is a representation of a single scan line bisecting the image of the barcode shown underneath. The scale on the Y-axis represents pixel values with distance in pixels on the X-axis. Note that the value of a pixel is derived from the RGB value using the formula (R + G + B) / 3. The
As the toolkit scans the images in a document, it assigns a “hit-count” to each barcode-like pattern it finds. The hit-count for a very clear barcode will typically be in the region 20 to 100, depending on the size of the barcode and the settings used within the sdk. The PrefOccurrence and MinOccurrence properties specify hit-count levels
The SkewTolerance property is used for the detection of barcodes in skewed documents, but it can have a negative impact on the performance of the ScanBarCode command, especially when reading PDf-417 and Datamatrix barcodes. One solution to this problem is to use xml settings, which allow you to store sets of properties which are applied
The SDK can be used to convert from TIFF to PDF format as part of the “tiff split” functionality. If the input file for the ScanBarCode method is in TIFF format and the TifSplitPath property is set to a value ending with “.pdf”, then the toolkit will split the input file into sub-files in PDF