python-vr-ticket

Python kikkare for reading Aztec barcodes on VR's train tickets

Background:

Finnish Railways (VR) uses Small Structured Barcodes (SSB) on travel documents. The SSBs are 6-layer Aztec 2D barcodes as specified in UIC leaflet 918-2. More can be read from ERA TAP TSI technical document B.6.

Links

• https://gist.github.com/derhuerst/26c1706c1bc1d9ebae76104a14d27f97
• https://www.era.europa.eu/activities/technical-specifications-interoperability_en
• https://www.era.europa.eu/content/tap

Dependencies:

The script depends on two packages:

• bitstring
• docbarcodes

The docbarcodes package is a wrapper for zxing which requires Java 8 environment to be installed.

Install:

Install packages:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage:

$ python python_vr_ticket.py <path_to_image>

python_vr_ticket reads the input image and looks for barcodes. When a barcode is succesfully found and processed, structured ticket data gets printed out.

Known issues

• Three number seats are unsupported by the specification as such. The specification supports only two numbers and a character. Therefore, for example, seat number 115 is encoded as 151, and seat 229 is encoded as 292.
• The zxing library which does all the detection and parsing work behind the scenes is not very good in reading Aztec codes. The source image must be very clean and large in size.