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This entire blog has loads of really interesting material on image manipulation with python. This blog was pretty interesting, it would have been cool to go the whole 9 yards and read the barcode though (maybe this technique isn't precise enough?)

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Hey, author of the post here. Detecting the barcode is actually the easy part. Reading the barcode is substantially harder. And there are many different types of barcode variations. It's not a simple problem, unfortunately. However, this approach could be used to read the barcode. I'll add a post related to reading the barcode to queue though! Thanks for the great feedback.

If you restrict yourself to UPC barcodes it's actually quite easy. I've done it in pure Python, don't even need Numpy. Unfortunately it's not ready for prime time yet.

I did a python barcode decoder for Code39 a few years ago: http://www.wiredfool.com/2006/07/04/barcode-recognition/ . Alternate symbologies aren't that hard to do since the decoding instructions are floating about.

And helpfully enough, my code needed a pretty good crop on the barcode, and that's what this article gives you.

This is great, thanks for sharing.

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