The concept of barcodes appeared decades ago. Traditionally the barcodes stared data in the form of parallel lines in different widths and they are known as 1D barodes and could only encode numbers [10] About 30 years ago. The first linear barcodes were used for railway transportation and tracking of the goods. Including manufacturing, postal, transportation, government, health care, retail business trade show and automotive business.

Barcodes, as machine-readable representation of information in a visual format can be easily stored, transferred, processed and validated. A linear barcode refers a way of encoding numbers and letters in a sequence width bars and spaces so that it can be read, retrieved, processed and validated using a computer.

Using barcodes provides a simple and inexpensive method of encoding text information that is easily read using electronic readers. Barodes are used widely because barcode technology and processing provide a fast and accurate tool to enter data without keyboard data entry. The research for storing more data in barcodes 1D to the development of 2D barcodes that can store large amount of data in a small area to support information distribution and detection without accessing a database. But 2D barcodes require sophisticated devices for decoding which was a challenge until recently. Today, with the advance of the image processing and multimedia capabilities of mobile devices they can be used as portable barcode encoding and decoding devices.

The barcode symbology refers to the protocol that defines a standard for arranging the bars and spaces that comprise a particular type of barcode, such as UPC-A and EAN. It defines the technical details of a particular barcode type, including the width of bars, character set. method of encoding.Checksum specifications, etc. Since the earlier forms of linear barcodes were not capable of encoding letters, 2D barcodes were invented to meet the needs of encoding alphanumeric data, including letters, numbers and punctuation marks. At the end of 1980s, two-dimensional (2D) barcodes appeared. With a much larger datacapacity: 2D barcodes became popularly used in different areas. PDF417, Micro PDF417 and DataMatrix are typical examples. In general, there are two types of 2D barcodes: a) stacked 2D barcodes, such as Code 49 and PDF417 and b) Matrix 2D barcodes, such as Data Matrix and QR Code.

Compared with 1D barcodes which hold vary limited information data, 2D baroodes has a much larger capacity to hold more information data Selecting and using 2D barcodes must consider the following factors: a) the application usage. b) standard C) implementation, d) the data you need to encode in barcodes, and d) how you wish to print the barcode. Each barcode type is a standard that defines the printed symbol and how a device such as a baroode scanner reads and decodes the printed symbol.