ZXing VS ZBar

The biggest difference between the two plugins is the SDK used to recognise the barcodes. The Capacitor Community Barcode Scanner plugin currently uses the ZXing decoder and the Capacitor ML Kit Barcode Scanning plugin uses the ML Kit from Google.

PyXing (website here) is supposedly a Python port of the popular Java ZXing library, but the initial and only commit is 6 years old and the project has no readme or documentation whatsoever.

In previous article, we discussed how to construct a command-line barcode and QR code scanning application using Java and Dynamsoft Barcode Reader. In this article, we will create more fancy applications, such as a desktop GUI application and a web application. In addition, we will import ZXing SDK to make a comparison with Dynamsoft Barcode Reader.

Extract the raw barcode from candidate regions: The extraction of barcodes from the candidate regions is being performed with zxing, an open source library which supports many variations of 1D and 2D barcodes.

Since most government software is written in Java, the QR codes on PDF check-in posters are probably being generated with ZXing [1].

[1] https://github.com/zxing/zxing

zxing has an online decoder -- https://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx -- but I've seen it fail so often that I'm wondering whether it's very "strict" / doesn't account for image distortion that much?

Or does the web site use hardcoded settings that are more tweakable in the library?

Huh, interesting -- zxing is in "Maintenance Mode Only": https://github.com/zxing/zxing

I'd be suuuuper interested to know: what's the state of the art in terms of QR decoding, both in terms of decoding speed, amenability to various image distortions, and (which I've always dreamed of) the ability to partially decode a QR code, even if the error correction fails for some parts of it, or even totally? i.e. a very very verbose debugging/decoding mode?

If it is in OpenCV probably you can use code from tutorials? (https://learnopencv.com/opencv-qr-code-scanner-c-and-python/) Or ZBar: http://zbar.sourceforge.net/ https://github.com/mchehab/zbar - there are builds for Windows

I'm pretty sure ZBar is supported on windows. It includes the zbarcam tool, which can scan from camera.

ZBar (website here) claims to be "an open source software suite for reading bar codes from various sources, such as image files." So I tried installing it on Mac OSX running sudo pip install zbar. This fails with error: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1. I tried to suggestions in the answers to this SO question, but I can't seem to solve it. So I decided to move on again: