Introduction to Barcode Detection API

You can use barcodes at several places during development. For instance, they can serve as an alternative way to sign in on a website; you can use them to eliminate the hassle of writing some piece of text for the user; they can also be used in your e-commerce websites for getting the product price. These are just some of the many use cases.

You also need to provide a way to scan barcodes through your website and then use the information it provides. Fortunately, a web API exists for this purpose. It's called Barcode Detection API. Let's take a look.

Barcode Detection API

As the name suggests, this web API lets you decode different kinds of barcodes. It takes an image, performs operations on it, and produces a result accordingly. The image can be provided in various ways, such as through the image, video or canvas tags.

The Barcode Detection API supports a lot of different barcodes, including aztec, data_matrix, qr_code, upc_a, etc. Among all these, the qr_code is widely used for encoding information like text, URL, or other data.

detect Method

The API provides a detect method that you can use to detect the barcode and then decode it. Here is how you do it:

js
Copy
try {
	const barcodes = await barcodeDetector.detect(image);
	barcodes.forEach(barcode => console.log(barcode));
} catch (err) {
	console.error('Barcode detection failed:', e);
}

The image is the barcode that you want to detect and then decode to access the information it provides.

Support

This API is not well supported across all major web browsers. It has partial support on Chrome, Edge, and Opera desktop versions and no support on Firefox and Safari.