flmnh-mgcl / datamatrix

Datamatrix Reader

Locate and decode datamatrix information from specimen images, created for the Digitization Department of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Given a collection of specimen images, the program will decode the datamatrix inside each image and rename / sort them according to a predefined, standardized naming scheme. Successful reads and edits, as well as failures, will be logged accordingly.

Installation and Usage

This is only compatible with Linux and MacOS systems. For both variants, you will need zbar and dmtx-utils installed on your system. Be sure to install Rust on your system, as well.

Installation of zbar and dmtx-utils for Linux will depend on your distribution. For MacOS, you may use Homebrew for convenience. Command Line Tools for Xcode will be an additional requirement on MacOS to install the necessary dependencies. You may type and enter the git command in your terminal and (assuming you have not installed git manually) you will be prompted to install the tool set. Once installed and cloned, the procedure would look like:

$ cargo run --release -- --help
$ cargo run --release -- [options] [flags]

This program's intended use is for the FLMNH, and as such the file naming scheme is specific. If this were to be adapted to a different project the renaming would need to be refactored in order to suit the new needs. In the Rust variant, this would not be too large a task, since it uses mostly regexes and a few string replacements (whitespace replaced with underscores). For example, the regex used to filter irrelevant text after decoding the datamatrix is:

r"(.*?)MGCL\s?[0-9]{7,8}"

If your institution had a datamatrix data convention of XYZ ### or XYZ ####, you could instead use

r"(.*?)XYZ\s?[0-9]{3,4}"

And remove the matching group to expose the targeted data

References