As early as 1940s,the two engineers Joe Woodland and Bernie Silver began to study the indicates the food items and the corresponding automatic identification equipment by code, and received a U.S patent in 1949.

But practical application and developments of barcode is still around in the 1970s. Up to now, the barcode technology has been commonly used in vast majority of countries and regions in the world, and it is rapidly promote around the world.

The barcode labels are having a high reliability. The accuracy of reading a barcode is far more than manual records, 15000 characters just appear one error. Barcode has greater flexibility, the identification device and the relative position of the labels’ strip has the degree of freedom is much greater than the OCR( Optical Character Recognition). A barcode usually expression the information only by one-dimensional, on the same barcode, the information represented is continuous and the same, so even if the label has some shortcomings, you can still enter the correct information from the normal part.

They also having a high efficiency, reading a barcode by machine is very fast, which is equivalent to 40 characters per second, this greatly improves the efficiency of data management.

To make barcode labels only needs a low cost. Compared with other automatic identification technology, the barcode only needs a small sticker and an optical scanner with simple structure, the cost is very low.

And it is easy to produce. The barcode’s preparation is very simple, production of barcode labels only needs print ,it can be called “a printable computer language”. The barcode recognition device’s structure is simple, so easy to operate.

Barcode is flexible and practical. Barcode symbol can manually input by keyboard, can also use related equipment to build a recognition system to automated identification, and also can be linked to entire system to achieve the automated management.