Importance

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Abstract

A method and apparatus reliably and robustly decode single width bar codes that may be placed on a variety of materials. The decoding is independent of whether or not the bar code represents dark bars on a light background or light bars on a dark background. The decoder may be implemented either in hardware or as part of a program in a stored program general purpose computer. The signal processing approach taken generates gap sequence information from width sequence information to match predetermined gap sequence patterns. The method and apparatus of the present invention are also particularly amenable to independent creation of the gap sequences from three different techniques which are independent and which thus add robustness to the system. Lastly, the decoding method of the present invention takes advantage of a preprocessing function to remove any certain forms of noise that may be present in the scanned data.

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First Claim