A Near-Instant Barcode-Based Library Inventory System Using Smart Mobile Devices

• Main Authors: Wu, Ming-Heng, 吳明衡
• Other Authors: Leu, Show-Wei
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9b63t7

碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 電機工程學系 === 104 === This thesis is a continuation of an effort to develop a barcode image based library inventory system. This research represents the third phase of the development in progress which emphasizes on establishing a highly efficient workflow, where photo images containing many barcodes are sent on-site through the Wi-Fi network to the server for processing and the results of database matching and related instructions are sent right back to the personnel inventorying. The development effort of this phase aims at transforming the original three-step inventory workflow into a near-instant one-step process. Thus, our work has concentrated on developing and integrating software applications for both mobile devices at the front-end and computer at the back-end. To streamline the inventory process, we have developed programs for Android mobile devices to send pictures of books on the shelves and to receive and display the corresponding instructions from the back-end server. Software components on the server side were also developed and integrated, so that the inventory personnel can manually handle the misplaced books on-site as well as confirm whether a book is truly missing from the shelf it belongs to. To evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the inventory system, we have employed three smartphones of different brands or models, each taking a group of 300 pictures for our experiment. Each picture taken contains from twenty-something to around fifty barcodes. If at least 70% of the barcodes in one picture can be correctly extracted is regarded as a successful recognition, then the ratios of successful recognition of the three picture groups are 49.0%, 82.3%, and 85.0%, respectively. The results indicate that how well the barcodes can be recognized is largely dictated by overall quality of the picture and has much less to do with camera resolution stated in the specification of a smartphone. Assuming proper lighting conditions and with mobile devices capable of producing high-quality pictures, our one-step library inventory system has a great potential to save time and manpower for libraries running with limited staff.