Abstract: Taking USB Camera as the input device,an improved EAN-13 barcode loaction and recogniton algorithm was proposed.First,the differences of the two successive frames was calculated.The current image frame was captured when the absolute value of the differences was less than a certain threshold.Morphological dilation and erosion algorithm was used to locate the barcode of the image caught by camera.Then,global threshold calculated by Otsu was used to segment the image located.Then,geometric correction of the tilted barcode was realized by the method of rectangular panning that was proposed in this paper.Finally,the barcode was recognised after calculating the barcode and empty width and judged whether was right.Experiments shows that the algorithm has a high recognition speed and high rate of recognition.