Hand-held Barcode Scanner: An Inexpensive Product for Small-Scale Retailers

Several local retailers at Indian grocery shops handle major crowd at peak hours. They did not do automated billing or inventory management because of complexities and cost associated with these systems. We interviewed local retailers to understand their problems related to product cataloging and checkout. They mentioned doing the job manually and agreed that this causes inconvenience. They said that automated system are expesive and they need to hire a computer operator to manage that.

To solve this problem we decided to prototype an easily operated and affordable barcode scanner that can perform automated product cataloging and ease the checkout procedure. The prototype consists of a raspberry pi processor and a pi camera. We added an led array around the camera which worked as flash in low light conditions. It has a microusb charger and has usb ports through which output device like receipt printer can be connected. It also has a led screen to display the status of the device.

We implemented image processing algorithms for segmentation and barcode scanning. According to our test runs, the scanner worked in different orientations and ambient light conditions. Our low-cost prototype with the complete functionality was a proof of concept that these systems can be a viable solution for local retailers.