What I need:
I need a java library (preferably for Android) that is capable of reliably decoding PDF417 barcodes, which may be distorted (not flat) and/or partially obscured.
What I've tried:
The Zxing PDF417 decoder is still in the alpha stages and lacks the speed and/or reliability that I require. I've tried porting the PDF417decode project to Java; the ported library worked but was no more reliable than the Zxing implementation.
Details:
Decoding must take place in software; no external hardware is permitted
The library can cost money
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time!
Manatee Works now offers a mobile SDK for Android and iOS that can read PDF417. It is the best!
I have tried SDK from AIPSYS, the library is native code with android, it is very fast compared to Java code, contact the technical support for details support#aipsys.com
PDF417.mobi should work with distorted barcodes. We have tried with codes that are perforated, smudged, cut-off and even covered with sauce. There is a video about that.
Disclaimer: I work for PDF417.mobi SDK team. We developed this SDK out of frustration that other libraries weren't reliable enough.
Related
I am currently working on a small project, which shall load an image from an URL, resize and change it's colour depth to only 16 colours using a specified colour palette. The main problem for me is, that I want a program, which I can use on an Android device and on a desktop computer.
Do you know a good image processing library which works on both systems?
Thanks in advance.
There are several tools:
ImageJ, http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/
Fiji, http://fiji.sc/wiki/index.php/Fiji
IMMI, http://www.burgsys.com/image-processing-software-free.php
BoofCV: http://boofcv.org
The answers on this page are quite dated as of February 2014. I was searching to find a free Android image processing library and I came across the Stanford lecture notes here: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee368/Android/index.html
Investigating a bit further, I found out that they are using OpenCV in their course material. It has a Java interface (along with many other languages), but the library is written natively in C++. They state that:
Along with well-established companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,
Intel, IBM, Sony, Honda, Toyota that employ the library, there are
many startups such as Applied Minds, VideoSurf, and Zeitera, that make
extensive use of OpenCV.
I am excited(!) to have found this, looking forward to going home and giving it a go.
The Android NDK allows you to use an existing C/C++ library that does not require java.awt or any of the Android classes. For example, you could easily compile libpng as a shared library for Android and then write a JNI interface to pass images from the Java layer to the png library. Similarly, you will also be able to compile libpng as a shared library for your desktop computer and use it from there.
I recently wrote a tutorial on how to compile open-source libraries for Android. If you browse the Android source, you will find some classes that use the skia graphics library via jni. I have not used skia before, but since Android has skia in its base framework, it should not be too difficult to get it to work in your app/desktop program.
Writing cross-platform programs has been an area of active interest amongst the mobile developers community, and some engines such as libgdx have gotten really good at it. So what you are attempting is definitely possible.
Octoate,
I don't think there is a library that exists that does what you want, the reason for that is on non-mobile platform every graphical operation you are going to use in Java is going to use the Java2D rendering pipeline to some degree. On Android, this doesn't exist.
Android provides its own graphical pipeline for image manipulation and actually simplifies a lot of things that are more complicated in standard Java.
All that being said, it looks like you found a library (JJIL) that acts as an abstraction layer on top of these differences, in that case I would be a bit worried about performance and do some testing in your own code to see how it performs compared to the platform methods. For example, I saw this quote from JJIL:
allows images to be converted from Android bitmaps into JJIL RgbImages
When I look at the source for RgbImages, it looks like the image data gets converted and stored in an internal array; all of those layers of abstraction are going to cost you CPU time and memory, especially as images on mobile devices get bigger due to higher resolution cameras and high-bandwidth connections.
This may not be that big of an issue, but again, you'll probably want to do some profiling/testing/performance comparisons.
Any pure Java library should work on both platforms. A Google search of "Java image processing library" produced several results. Try to find the lightest weight lib that serves your purposes since memory and CPU are limited on mobile devices.
Barry
Does anybody now some tool that can help me to recognize numeric values from photos in Java-based Blackberry application?
Aspire is a java based OCR SDK. I am not sure how much it will useful for Blackberry. Try yourself.
Another one is JavaOCR. It is 100% java. Its author posts on his blog.
I need to develop web app that will return qr code(or link to qr code) to mobile clients. I plan to learn the basics of GWT because i alredy know java programming.
Is it possible to use zxing libraries or some other java libraries with GWT, so generating (encoding) QR codes could be done with a few lines of code? Or do you suggest any other option?
The QR code that will be returned by server will depend on ID that will come with the request from mobile phone.
Tnx
Generating the QR code in-server using a library such as zxing is a pretty obvious way to go about this an could be absolutely appropriate for your application.
But you might also consider off-loading this to an external web-service such as Google Charts. See here. The advantage of this approach, if it works for you, is that you free your service resources and bandwidth from the responsibility so it would likely scale better and be less complex to develop.
The caveat is, of course, is that your application would have to satisfy the provider's terms of use
I am in the concept phase of an application that is going to have a lot of Audio/Video input and output. I want to do it in Java; but somehow am not fully convinced yet. What do you think? How bad could it be? And any advices?
Why I am thinking Java:
It's the language I'm most comfortable with.
Easier cross platform migration would be a bonus.
Cannot afford commercial platforms (like .NET) or not good enough in other free alternatives (like Python)
I'm also slightly inclined towards C++/Qt; but that would take more time for me as I'm not great in that and I am a bit worried about maintainability.
If you're interested, check out Xuggler. It exposes all the power of FFmpeg, but as a Java API that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. The advantage is you get all the power of FFmpeg but from Java. The disadvantage is it requires the FFmpeg native DLLs/shared-libraries to be installed.
Easier cross platform migration would be a bonus.
Audio and video means you will be dealing with dedicated native libraries and JNI-wrappers for each supported platform; in this case, the cross-platform argument for Java does not really apply.
I believe that when you want to write an audio/video application, the programming language you will use is the second most important thing. The most important thing is the audio/video framework your application will use since this is what defines your capabilities.
I am aware of two popular generic video frameworks that can be used to accesd most multimedia types: Directshow and ffmpeg. Directshow is tied with windows, so only ffmpeg is left.
Ffmpeg has versions in both windows and unix and, although it is written in C, it can be used from a lot of languages.
There is even a number of java wrappers for ffmpeg (for instance, take a look at xuggle)!
C++ would be the first choice because of performance concerns often present in Audio/Video processing as well as the range of available libraries for video/audio.
You do make a good point about being familiar with Java. If you are pressed for time, this is even more important. However if you can spare some time for learning, C++ would be well worth it.
Regarding .NET: The .NET SDK with everything you need is freely downloadable. Get hold of a free IDE such as SharpDevelop and you are up and running. It's Visual Studio that costs money, you don't need Visual Studio to do .NET development.
Rusty.in,
How about trying to do JavaFX Media API. Recently, the version of the JavaFX is 1.2.0 with GUI Application as well. It supports the Swing. The grammar is based on the script style; however, you can deploy the existing Swing components into the JavaFX.
I hope it helps.
Tiger
Rusty, what did you wind up doing? I too have a video app I'd like to do, but really would prefer Java/JavaFX over C++. The thing about the using Flash and/or the current JavaFX video support is that Flash video playback is not frame-accurate. I really need to be able to stop/start/step on individual frames like you can with QuickTime.
Has anyone tried doing playback with Xuggler and Java/JavaFX?
I want to generate a thumbnail preview of videos in Java. I'm mostly JMF and video manipulation alienated.
Is there an easy way to do it?
What about codecs? Will I have to deal with it?
Any video type is suported? (including Quicktime)
Well, since you're not stuck with JMF, have you considered Xuggler? Xuggler is a Java API that uses FFmpeg under the covers to do all video decoding and encoding. It's free and LGPL licensed.
In fact, we have a tutorial that shows How to Make Thumbnails of an Existing File
There seems to be a few examples out there that are far better than what I was going to send you.
See http://krishnabhargav.blogspot.com/2008/02/processing-videos-in-java.html.
I'd agree with Stu, however. If you can find a way to get what you want using some command-line tools (and run them using Commons-Exec), you might have a better overall solution than depending on what is essentially the Sanskrit of Java extensions.
Are you sure that JMF is right for you? Unfortunately, it is not in particularly good shape. Unless you are already committed to JMF, you very well may want to investigate alternatives. Wikipedia has a decent overview at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Media_Framework
Many JMF developers have complained that it supports few codecs and formats in modern use. Its all-Java version, for example, cannot play MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Windows Media, RealMedia, most QuickTime movies, Flash content newer than Flash 2, and needs a plug-in to play the ubiquitous MP3 format. While the performance packs offer the ability to use the native platform's media library, they're only offered for Linux, Solaris and Windows. Furthermore, Windows-based JMF developers can unwittingly think JMF provides support for more formats than it does, and be surprised when their application is unable to play those formats on other platforms.
Another knock against JMF is Sun's seeming abandonment of it. The API has not been touched since 1999, and the last news item on JMF's home page was posted in November 2004.
While JMF is built for extensibility, there are few such third-party extensions.
Furthermore, editing functionality in JMF is effectively non-existent, which makes a wide range of potential applications impractical.
My own server-side app shells out to FFmpeg to do the encoding. I'm 98.42% sure FFmpeg does snapshots, too. (It is an all singing, all dancing beast of a program. The command line options alone could fill a book.)
Check it out: ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu
There is a relatively newer option called JThumbnailer that you find here: https://github.com/makbn/JThumbnail
JThumbnail is a Java library for creating Thumbnails of common types
of file including .doc, .docx, .pdf , .mp4 and etc. full list