Creating a UI for Reading Barcodes

In this lesson, we’ll look at a practical application of the Gradio library together with the pyzbar and OpenCV libraries. Our focus will be on creating an application for reading barcodes.

As mentioned before, barcodes are ubiquitous in today’s world and are used extensively in retail, logistics, and inventory management to quickly and accurately identify products. However, reading and interpreting these barcodes typically requires specialized hardware or software.

As we have also seen in lessons in previous chapters, there exist powerful libraries for Python for image processing and barcode decoding. So, with the help of the pyzbar, OpenCV, and Gradio libraries, we can build our own barcode reader.

Thanks to Gradio, we can also make this functionality accessible to end-users who may not have coding expertise. As we saw in the previous lesson, Gradio allows us to create simple, intuitive user interfaces.

Here, we’ll see how, with just a few lines of code, we can build an application that takes an image as input, reads any barcodes present in the image, and displays the results.

Imagine the potential applications of this in a warehouse setting. Workers could use our Gradio interface to scan items and retrieve information as part of a larger inventory management system.

This could significantly streamline the process of inventory tracking and management. The user-friendly interface means that workers can use the application without understanding or interacting with the underlying Python code.

Building a user interface to detect barcodes

In the code below, we’ll create a simple UI with Gradio ...