On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, Noriyasu wrote:
> But if you're able to create QR code by yourself you should be able to
> read it too.
Not at all. Knowing how the data are encoded in the bar code is the easy
part of the problem; figuring out what the data are from a random image
is much more difficult.
If you want to get a sense of how difficult this is, take an image
format that's very easy to parse (such as TIFF) and try to write a
program that takes an image of a black line on a white background and
tells you what angle that line is tilted at (horizontal, vertical, 45
degrees, that kind of thing). That's an extremely easy image processing
problem, and I think you'll find even that a bit of a challange.
> If you have programmed everything on yourself and based on public
> knowledge (how to create QR codes) it should be ok and you do not need
> to pay.
You do not need to pay because Denso is not exercising their patent
rights. However, even if you write your own reader from scratch, you are
probably making a device similar enough to the one that they patented
that they could, at any time, stop you from distributing it to others.
This actually works pretty well for them, I think. "Little guys,"
without a lot to lose anyway, will just go ahead and build creators and
readers assuming that Denso won't touch them (and they probably won't).
Anybody with a larger investment in the technology will either buy
Denso's software or, if they roll their own, seek a licencing agreement
anyway just to be on the safe side.
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, Benjamin Joffe wrote:
> Denso sells readers and creation softwares, but no "reader software".
> I guess that if you get the specification document from ISO (200 CHF,
> ~180 USD for the paper or electronic version) you should have all
> required information to code a reader as well (which would probably be
> faster than reverse-engineer the coding method from an encoder).
There is enough information in that web page to make a reader, if you
have a reasonable knowledge of image recognition. Not many people do,
however.
cjs
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Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Sun Mar 6 07:15:54 2005