Building PDF417 2D barcode system for management inventory

Abstract

Today, 1-D barcode is widely used in managing products’ supply chain. However 1-D barcodes have limitations in capacity and pattern diversity, so producers expect new kinds of barcodes that can store multiple forms of information including words and numbers. This advantage of 2D barcode is one among motivations for me to research this subject. With two-dimensional barcode, the data is encoded in both the height and the width of the symbol, so 2-D barcode can satisfy the requirement of producers in improving capacity of information stored in barcode. There are many kinds of 2-D barcode such as : PDF417, Data matrix, QR code,. . etc. . . . PDF417 is one of 2D, a high-capacity barcode developed by Symbol technology, Inc. A PDF417 symbol can hold approxiamtely 2000 characters of information. PDF417 is used today in a wide variety of applications, including logistics & transportation, retailing, healthcare, government, identification, and manufacturing. In this thesis, the algorithm of PDF417 will be investigated and improved, a program will be built to generate and read the PDF417 to form up a completed system.