Mobile Phone Based Interaction with Everyday Products - On the Go

Linking the physical world with information and services is a powerful concept. Even though RFID technology is very promising, the widespread use of RFID tags on retail products remains unlikely for the next years. In contrast, barcodes are ubiquitous - printed on virtually all consumer items world-wide. Recently there is an increasing interest in applications based on the recognition of standard ID barcodes using the built-in cameras of mobile phones. Since many of the potential applications are especially useful when being "on the go", e.g., while shopping, a simple and fast user interaction is essential. In this paper we want to present two contributions that enable such a simple and fast interaction with everyday products and their services: A system for the recognition of ID barcodes on mobile phones that differs in two aspects from already existing solutions: the fast and robust real-time recognition of codes on the camera\´s video images as well as the live detection of additional code parameters, like the barcode\´s relative orientation to the mobile phone. Besides that, we present and suggest the usage of these additional parameters in order to ease and accelerate the user interaction process -for example with the help of orientation sensitive menus.