YOLO-Barcode: towards universal real-time barcode detection on mobile devices

Abstract

Existing approaches to barcode detection have a number of disadvantages, including being tied to specific types of barcodes, computational complexity or low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose YOLO-Barcode – a deep learning model inspired by the You Only Look Once approach that allows to achieve high detection accuracy with real-time performance on mobile devices. The proposed model copes well with a large number of densely spaced barcodes, as well as highly elongated one-dimensional barcodes. YOLO-Barcode not only successfully detects the huge variety of barcode types, but also classifies them. Comparing with the previous universal barcode detector DilatedModel based on semantic segmentation, the YOLO-Barcode is 4 times faster and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ZVZ-real public dataset: 98.6% versus 88.9% by F1-score. The analysis of existing publicly available datasets reveals the absence of many real-life scenarios of mobile barcode reading. To fill this gap, the new “SE-barcode” dataset is presented. The proposed model, used as a baseline, achieves a 92.11% by F1-score on this dataset.