ZBar vs. zxing - QR recognition comparison

Question

Can anyone tell which library is better in small QR Codes recognition under low lighting conditions? Platform is iPhone 4/iOS 5 I tried both Barcodes (zxing) and the ZBar apps and it seems that zxing was noticeably better in recognizing the codes under "hard" conditions. That said, it wasn't a very large sample test.

Any inputs on the actual image recognition capabilities (speed+quality) of both libraries would be helpful.

TIA.

Answer 1

I have found that Zxing very good on the later iPads and iPhones. The iPad 2 camera was very slow with Zxing, but the later cameras were much faster and have better focusing, which improved speed considerably.

One "hack" I did with Zxing on iPad 2 is to change the rectangle in code. I would progressively zoom out on each attempt, so rather than use the rectangle shown I would expand it out in steps, so I would check 5 times for each scan. The results were much much improved. On the iPad 3 etc this was not so necessary, but still I have the code in there and it is fast.

I have used both ZBar and ZXing in Windows using scanners (300 DPI), and found dense QRCodes a problem for ZXIng and had to include ZBar support. Implementing ZBar support was very tricky and had to write my own API, if anyone is interested.