What type of BarCode is this?

Question

I am starting the process of writing an application, one part of which is to decode bar codes, however I'm off to a bad start. I am no bar code expert and this is not a common bar code type, so I'm in trouble. I cannot figure out what type of bar code this is, which I have to decode.

I have looked on Wikipedia and some other sites with visual descriptions of different types of bar codes (and how to identify them), however I cannot identify it. Please note that I have tried several free bar code decoding programs and they have all failed to decode this.

So here is a picture of that bar code:

alt text http://www.shrani.si/f/2B/4p/4UCVyP72/barcode.jpg

I hope one of you can recognize it. Also if anyone has worked with this before and knows of a library that can decode them (from an image), I'd love to hear about them.

I'm very thankful for any additional pointers I can receive. Thank you.

Answer 1

zbar thinks it's Code 128 but the decoded string is suspiciously different than the barcode's own caption. Maybe it's a charset difference?

~/src/zebra-0.5/zebraimg$ ./zebraimg ~/src/barcode/reader/barcode.jpg 
CODE-128:10657958011502540742
scanned 1 barcode symbols from 1 images in 0.04 seconds

My old copy was called zebra but the library is now called zbar. http://sourceforge.net/projects/zbar/

Answer 2

I don't recognize this bar code - but here are a few sites that might help you (libraries etc.) - assuming you use C# and .NET (you didn't specify in your question):

• http://www.idautomation.com/csharp/
• http://www.bokai.com/barcode.net.htm

Answer 3

It looks a bit like Code 128 but http://www.onlinebarcodereader.com/ does not recognize it as such. Maybe the image quality isn't good enough.

Answer 4

If you are using Java:

http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

Open Source, supports multiple types of barcodes

A list of software can be found here:

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Bar_Code/Decoding/

Answer 5

IANABCE (I Am Not A Barcode Expert), but looking at the barcodes here, I'd say this looks closest to the UCC/EAN-128 symbology, character set 'C'.

Do you know what the barcode is used for? What's the application domain?