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This article explains why barcode technology is widely used in
industries and what the advantages and disadvantages of other methods.
The fast growing in micro-computer industries greatly lower the entry
for businesses to enter the markets. The requirement to computerized input
technology is ever increasing.
There are many input methods in the markets. The traditional method is
to use keyboard typing. It is good for an editor to compile articles, but
is far not sufficient as a means of item input. The problem associated with
manual typing is that the error rate is very high, approximately 1 error
per 300 characters. To resolve this problem many automatic input method has
been proposed and deployed.
Evaluation Measures
There are two important measures used in evaluating the input methods.
The first is called SER (substitution error rate), which indicates
the probability of a scanned character contains an error. The second
parameter is the FRR ( the first read rate) which indicates the
probability of capturing all the data in the first attempt. In addition to
that, the cost of printing and reading needs to examined.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
In 1970s, ANSI proposed the OCR standards to be used to label products
or documents. OCR is a stylized font recognizable by both human and
computers. The most commonly used OCR fonts are OCR-A and OCR-B, as shown
at the right column.
OCR was selected as standards in some industries in 1970s but the usage
has been declined as the barcode technology steadily receive the favor. The
problem with OCR is that the SER is still too high to be used in major
industries.
Sample OCR-A, OCR-B Font:
 
Magnetic Ink
Magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) is the commonly used checks in
US, Canada and Western European countries. There is slight difference
between the US and European standard on the MICR.
MICR characters can be read optically and magnetically because it is
printed with a magnetic ink. Currently banking industry is the only one
using MICR technology due the legacy. Since special ink is required, the
MICR is expensive for most industries. Below are the samples of MICR font:
Radio Frequency Identification (RF)
This technology is most advanced, but yet expensive to adopt. The RF
readers transmits the commands to the tag, and the tag responds with a
radio frequency which stores the information. The benefits of RF technology
is that the signal can pass certain distance, easy to communicate with host
computers.
Smart Cards (IC card)
A smart card is a small package containing circuits and memory chips.
Smart card can be made contact-less. It can store and encrypt a lot of
information. The cost is relatively high. Smart cards are usually carried
by personnel, recoding personal information.
Bar code
The substantial advantages of barcode technology is very low printing
cost and error rates. The density can be very high too with the invention
of high density linear symbologies and 2D symbologies. The SER is usually 1
per 1 million characters and FRR is usually higher than 90%. Due to this
reason, barcode technology is now widely used in most of industries as a
means of automatic input.
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