Barinsa (Master's thesis)
Description
For his master's thesis Markus Madeja created a mobile app (with backend) that helped the user to navigate through the jungle of information and consume. Barinsa was one of the first software for camera phones which was able to recognize 1D barcodes. Barinsa could display product information based on recognized or manually entered product codes. Currently the codes that can be found on most products are supported, these are EAN-8, EAN-13, UPC-A, or ISBN-13. The software was for Symbian OS, that had the greatest market share at the time. (Android was small back then.)
Barinsa could download information from the internet or could use saved information from an on-device database. The presented barcode scanner Barinsa implemented unique features like the information retrieval with/without internet connection, on-device recognition and usage of an on-device data base, and the display of color-coded food ingredients including the possibility to access background information on such ingredients. Especially was the programs recognition rate. Extensive tests in real life situations show a nearly 100 percent accuracy. Barcodes can be heavily distorted, shaky, out of focus or in twilight.
Markus Madeja and his thesis supervisors created a prototype for Android and for iPhone in 2010 but the project stopped after that.