READING FEATURES
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7
7 READING
FEATURES
7.1 ADVANCED CODE RECONSTRUCTION (ACR™ 4)
The traditional way of barcode reading could be called “Linear Reading”. In this case, the
laser beam crosses the barcode symbol from its beginning to its end as shown in the
following figure:
Laser Beam
Figure 85 – Linear Reading
In Advanced Code Reconstruction mode it is no longer necessary for the laser beam to cross
the label from the start to the end. With just a set of partial scans on the label (obtained using
the motion of the label itself), the scanner is able to “reconstruct” the barcode. A typical set of
partial scans is shown in the figure below:
Code Direction
Figure 86 – Partial Scans
None of the partial scans contains the whole label. The decoder aligns each partial scan
correctly and combines them in order to obtain the entire code.
The alignment is performed by calculating the time difference from one partial scan to
another using a reference code element.
ACR4 therefore has an intrinsic ability to increase the reading percentage of damaged codes
as in the examples below:
ACR4™ Readable
Figure 87 – ACR4™ Readable Codes
