Using circular dot pattern code tag for medical information on the round type medical package

Administration of medicines is important issue for patient safety in medical applications. Especially, manufacture date and expiry date are very important. Medical applications have strong needs for embedded tags on medical bottles to facilitate medicine management. One-dimensional 1D barcode cannot represent the required information capacity. Two-dimensional 2D barcode and radio-frequency identification RFID systems can support information capacity. However, 2D barcode is hard to recognition, if 2D barcode tag is attached on curvature surface. RFID is 100 times more expensive than barcode systems and also it is difficult to embed RFID tags on curvature. In this paper, we propose circular dot pattern code CDPC tag for cylindrical and round type medical bottle identification and management. CDPC is based on topology of dot pattern code, and it is well suited to recognising tags in curvature environments. Experimental results show that CDPC outperformed 2D barcode in its recognition rate on curvature, including cylindrical and round shape.