Reed-Solomon Based Bar Code Character Substitution Rates

The use of Reed-Solomon error correction (RSEC) in bar code symbologies has been around since the early 1990s, but there hasn’t been an in depth, publicly accessible study done on their resistance to character substitution errors since the original studies done in the early 1990s at Ohio University. This article reports on the test results from the scanning of more 23 million scans resulting in more than 2.39 billion characters across four different RSEC enabled bar code symbologies (Data Matrix, QR code, PDF417 and Aztec Code) with five different scanners. The results show that the RSEC enabled symbologies are capable of achieving at least a 1 in 797 million error rate, allowing for their use in instances where decoded data accuracy is imperative.