Apparatus and method for decoding damaged optical codes

Digital imaging technology continues to improve and find widespread acceptance in both consumer and industrial applications. Digital imaging sensors are now commonplace in video movie cameras, security cameras, video teleconference cameras, machine vision cameras and, more recently, hand-held bar code readers. As each application matures, the need for intelligent image processing techniques grows. To date, the large data volume attendant to transmitting a digital image from one location to another could only be accomplished if the two locations were connected by a wired means. Machine vision and imaging-based automatic identification applications required significant computing power to be effective and correspondingly require too much electricity to be useful in portable applications. The trend now in both consumer and industrial markets is toward the use of portable wireless imaging that incorporates automatic identification technology. An improved optical code reading system and method that enhances the ability of a reader to locate a symbol within a field of view and enhances the error-correcting properties of the encoding scheme commonly used in 2D bar codes. The reader offsets the effects of damaged finder patterns and missing symbol perimeters and, thereafter, detects high-level symbol information such as the code type, symbol size, and the number of rows and columns in the symbol. The reader then identifies those missing portions of a damaged symbol and marks each missing data bit location with a predetermined indicator. A decoding algorithm then interprets the missing bit indicator as an error of known location (e.g., an "erasure"), thereby nearly doubling the error correcting strength of all bar codes employing the Reed-Solomon error correction scheme.