A statistical tool for Barcode misread analysis

Barcodes are a mature technology which is widely used in the automatic identification field. Most barcode symbologies adopt a check digit to increase the reliability of the reading process. Nevertheless, the misreading probability cannot be completely eliminated and is increased by detrimental factors such as poor print quality or signal distortions introduced by the reader. In safety-critical applications, a quantitative risk analysis is often required, in order to evaluate the misreading probability in operative conditions. In this paper we will describe the implementation of a two steps process useful to perform an error risk analysis on a barcode scanner in real operative conditions. The tools we developed allow to estimate the distortion introduced by the reader and to simulate the reading process on a large number of randomly generated barcodes. The performances of the tools we developed will be presented along with a discussion of real case study.