In this post, I will show you how to build a barcode and Qr code reader using Python. This is a great machine learning project to get started with computer vision. In my previous posts, I showed how to  recognize faces and also how to  recognize text in an image using python. These are great projects to practice your skills. Today, we will something a little more different and that is barcode and QR code reader.

I think Barcodes/QR codes are very cool and interesting because they store information in a different format. The fun part about them is we can’t really tell what they are storing until we scan them. It’s like playing a puzzle game. And one more thing that I like about them is they can be part of the physical world and still connects us to the internet world. Isn’t that really cool?

Table of Contents:

• Getting Started
• Libraries
• Decoding Function
• Main Function
• Video Demonstration

Getting Started

If you are wondering how barcode and QR code readers work, let’s do a quick real-life practice. Turn on your phone’s camera and show the featured image of this article. You will see a link show up, it’s very simple to use. Today, we will create our own reader, without losing any time let’s get started!

We will start by installing the libraries that we will need for this project and then we will start programming. For this project, I recommend using a regular code editor instead of a Jupyter notebook.

Libraries

In this step, we will install the following three libraries: Pillow, OpenCV and Pyzbar. Pillow library is also known as PIL, which stands for Python Image Library. OpenCV is a well-known library, especially when working with computer vision projects. And lastly Pyzbar, a python library that will help us read the barcode and QR codes. Let’s start installing them.

#machine-learning #deep-learning #artificial-intelligence #python