Realeyes3D, a pioneer in mobile imaging applications and services for camera phones, and a trusted player in mobile document scanning with the award-winning Qipit service, has announced that it has “cracked” a key mobile commerce challenge: Making 1D bar codes readable with about any camera phone. The 1D barcode is the familiar striped stamp that is on everything from a bag of potato chips to your cell phone battery, and its decoding required dedicated optical readers until now.
Commercial-grade mobile 1D bar code scanning will reduce the time-to-market and go-to-market costs of mobile barcode decoding solutions, thus enabling in the near future a large number of m-commerce applications, such as in-shop competitive price comparison, instant access to product information, purchase of content and goods on the go, and many more. Mobile 1D bar code scanning has a market adoption potential that far exceeds that of mobile 2D bar code scanning, because 1D bar codes are already present on myriads of manufactured goods and printed content. On the contrary, 2D barcodes still have to be affixed on goods and content
RealEyes3D’s “one-click” 1D bar code deblurring technology, currently in pilot testing phase with major wireless carriers, relies on a breakthrough proprietary image processing technology that restores 1D bar code images shot from a camera phone, and enables them to be read with virtually any camera phone model available in the market.
As one of the most ubiquitous ways to store machine-readable information, barcodes create a link between physical objects and digital information. Regular 1D bar codes are everywhere, printed on billions of products worldwide and already linked to a vast number of both free and commercial databases.
Drawing on its over five years experience designing and marketing successful mobile imaging applications, ’s invention leapfrogs the main blocking point for reading a 1D bar code from a mobile photo: the blur of the bar code lines. Most of the time, the small size of 1D bar codes makes it difficult for a camera phone user to take a photo of the code that is not blurred. When shot at a close distance, beyond the minimum focus distance of most camera phones, bar code lines become blurred in the image. The information they represent is destroyed, thus preventing correct decoding. This, together with the variety of bar code sizes, surfaces on which they are printed, and the poor quality of pictures of 1D bar codes produced by most camera phones, did not allow until now for mass-market commercial-grade 1D bar code mobile scanning. Only larger 1D bar codes could be decoded up until now with high-end camera phones (which feature either a macro mode or an auto focus lens), thus limiting the adoption of mobile 1D bar code scanning to a few pilot implementations and early adopters.
“Our technology dramatically increases both the number of camera phones that can be used for 1D bar code scanning and the decoding performance of any camera phone, by increasing the number of bar code pictures that can be read,” said Benoit Bergeret, founder and CEO of Realeyes3D. “Our unique deblurring technology enables mobile 1D bar code scanning to considerably expand its scope and accelerates the introduction of one-click m-commerce applications for the benefit of all camera phone users — not just for high-end users anymore.”
RealEyes3D’s mobile 1D bar code decoding technology is available either for embedding on handsets or as a server library. It can also be deployed in any back-end architecture supporting 2D bar code decoding and is compatible with the decoding of all 1D bar code formats. Handset manufacturers willing to integrate mobile barcode deblurring in their devices will benefit from Realeyes3D’s extensive experience developing and integrating embedded mobile imaging applications in over 50 million handsets to date.
Investors in RealEyes3D are: I-Source Gestaion SA, Partech International, Siemens Venture Capital, Atlas Venture LLP.
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