Many of today’s manufactured products printed or stamped text on their surface, including 2D or 3D barcodes, labels, or alphanumeric characters. The challenge is not only reading this text with speed and accuracy but doing so for both 2D intensity (flat) and 3D height map (raised/embossed) codes and characters.

This challenge is now solved using a Gocator® 3D sensor and the built-in Barcode and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. In part 1 of this 2 part blog, we will explore the new Surface Barcode tool in Gocator®.

Barcode Reading

The new Surface Barcode tool in Gocator® allows you to decode data encoded in linear (1D) and 2D barcodes from surface data (intensity data or heightmap data) without the need for 2D vision cameras or barcode readers. The tool also supports dot-peened types (Datamatrix and QR code).

1D barcode reading

How it Works

Gocator® scans the target with a laser profiler or takes a snapshot and generates a 3D surface. Next, in the browser-based Gocator interface, you simply drag and drop the tool and set the region of interest to identify and decode 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional barcodes.

QR code reading

In addition, you can use the tool to determine and validate the barcode content. The tool achieves this by comparing the string in the Validation parameter with the decoded string.

The Surface Barcode Tool works on:

• Two-dimensional intensity data from printed markings, as seen in this example of a PCB label.
• And, three-dimensional heightmap (or “embossed”) data, as seen in this example of a 3D printed QR code.

The decoded string is displayed in the data viewer, and is available as a data output that can be communicated to a PLC or the Gocator SDK.

The Surface Barcode tool currently supports 14 barcode types including:

• All 1D (linear) barcodes
• Data Matrix
• EAN
• ISBN
• UPC
• QR Code
• And more

3D Data Matrix reading

Stay tuned for part 2, where we’ll explore the Surface OCR tool.