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Unparalleled Barcode Scanning Speed
Speed and accuracy are two of the most important aspects to measure barcode scanning performance. How fast can the barcode scanning speed be under the premise of ensuring accuracy? To explore the limits of barcode scanning speed, we use Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK to do a test. Click the link below to a video of the speed test.
The result shows that 745 barcodes were successfully read and 250 unique values of barcodes were decoded in 30 seconds. It is much faster than the industry’s 2nd best vendor.
This article covers all the details of the testing process, including scanning scenarios, hardware set-up, software settings and results analysis.
Scanning Scenario
We built a miniature conveyor belt using Lego toys to simulate an industry scanning scenario of assembly lines. The electric motor drives the entire conveyor belt to rotate clockwise. It could rotate 20 times per minute, which means one revolution in 3 seconds. In this test, we set the speed to have the conveyor belt rotate 20 times per minute.
We fixated 25 barcodes throughout the entire conveyor belt, and each fixture has a Code 93 barcode on it. The decoded values on the barcodes start at A0000-A and end at A0024-Y. The goal is to correctly read all 25 barcodes in every 3-second cycle.
Hardware Information
We use an Android smartphone to scan barcodes. The camera parameters are as follows: 12 MP, f/1.8, 27mm (wide), 1/2.3”, PDAF, Laser AF; 8 MP, f/2.4, 54mm (telephoto), PDAF, 2x optical zoom; 16 MP, f/2.2, 17mm (ultrawide). The camera supports automatic focus (laser focus, phase focus, contrast focus) and AI anti-shake. Video shooting supports 4K recording at most.
Software Settings
In order to improve the recognition speed, we use Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer (DCE) and Dynamsoft Barcode Reader at the same time. Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer is a multifunctional camera module. With its high-level APIs, it is easy to utilize cameras to its full capacity in your mobile apps.
To increase the speed, we will enable the Frame Filter Modes. In this mode, DCE can filter out blurry frames. DCE will automatically skip these frames and grab the latest frames from the frame queue for recognition. This will reduce the waiting time for decoding and improve barcode scanning speed.
The screen resolution is 1920*1080 pixels and the frame per second (FPS) is set to 25. The expected decoding number of a single frame is 1, which means there is only one barcode in each frame that will be decoded.
It should be noted that the recognition between adjacent frames may be repeated. But we will not filter these codes in the final result. After getting all the final results, we will manually calculate how many single barcode values we have decoded in the whole process.
Besides, we choose Scan Directly Mode of localization algorithm.
Results Analysis
- Duplicate results not filtered out
Based on FPS25, we can calculate that there are 750 frames in 30 seconds. Dynamsoft Barcode Reader has processed a total of 745 frames. The average speed of processing one frame and returning the barcode result is 40.27 ms.
- Duplicate results filtered out
We filtered out all the repeated values within 6 of the consecutive frames, and we got 25 returned results at the end of each loop. A total of 250 unique decoded values were obtained after deconstruction. After analyzing the results, we found that Dynamsoft Barcode Reader could read on average 8.33 non-repeating barcode values per second.
Dynamsoft Barcode Reader picked up all of the barcodes within the 30 seconds we tested, making an accuracy rate of 100%.
frames processed in 30 seconds | barcode results | barcode results with duplicates filtered out | |
Dynamsoft | 745 | 745 | 250 |
Competitor | 588 | 588 | 240 |
Details
We output all the results below.
| Value | Counts | Value | Counts |
| A0000-A | 32 | A0014-O | 29 |
| A0001-B | 24 | A0015-P | 24 |
| A0002-C | 27 | A0016-Q | 33 |
| A0003-D | 22 | A0017-R | 26 |
| A0004-E | 30 | A0018-S | 34 |
| A0005-F | 33 | A0019-T | 33 |
| A0006-G | 30 | A0020-U | 31 |
| A0007-H | 36 | A0021-V | 29 |
| A0008-I | 35 | A0022-W | 27 |
| A0009-J | 33 | A0023-X | 30 |
| A0010-K | 30 | A0024-Y | 33 |
| A0011-L | 27 | Total | 745 |
| A0012-M | 26 | ||
| A0013-N | 31 |
Other commercial barcode SDKs
We also compared other popular commercial barcode reader SDKs on the market. We found that the combination of Dynamsoft Barcode Reader and Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer could reach a decoding speed 20% faster than the industry’s 2nd best.
Limitations
The only drawback during this test was that the motor speed was limited to a certain speed. So, we were unable to drill down to the recognition speed limit of the Dynamsoft Barcode Reader. According to the current testing results, Dynamsoft Barcode Reader is able to meet most of the industrial scenarios that have strict requirements for fast barcode scanning speed.