July 12, 2007

Under poor lighting conditions digital cameras often have trouble distinguishing between similar colors like red vs. magenta or blue vs. cyan. Naturally, this creates a problem for color barcodes that rely on this distinction to scan properly. One solution is to avoid troublesome colors altogether by blocking out certain module locations in the final layer to limit the number of distinct colors displayed. The mockup shown here would achieve ~2.5 times the storage capacity of a same-sized standard Data Matrix, and has only black and white modules around its perimeter just like a standard Data Matrix symbol. This means we can use the standard libdmtx region detection logic without modification. Like before this is just a concept, but if it performs well I could see it being used in mobile applications to compensate for lost capacity when suboptimal camera optics limit the maximum reliable symbol size.