Mobile Phone Based Interaction with Everyday Products - On the Go

Linking the physical world with information and services is a powerful concept. Even though RFID technology is very promising, the widespread use of RFID tags on retail products remains unlikely for the next years. In contrast, barcodes are ubiquitous - printed on virtually all consumer items world-wide. Recently there is an increasing interest in applications based on the recognition of standard ID barcodes using the built-in cameras of mobile phones. Since many of the potential applications are especially useful when being "on the go", e.g., while shopping, a simple and fast user interaction is essential. In this paper we want to present two contributions that enable such a simple and fast interaction with everyday products and their services: A system for the recognition of ID barcodes on mobile phones that differs in two aspects from already existing solutions: the fast and robust real-time recognition of codes on the camera's video images as well as the live detection of additional code parameters, like the barcode's relative orientation to the mobile phone. Besides that, we present and suggest the usage of these additional parameters in order to ease and accelerate the user interaction process -for example with the help of orientation sensitive menus.