RepSAU-Net: Semantic Segmentation of Barcodes in Complex Backgrounds via Fused Self-Attention and Reparameterization Methods

In the digital era, commodity barcodes serve as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds and are widely used in retail checkout systems. To meet the broader application demands for product identification, this paper proposes a method for locating, semantically segmenting barcodes in complex backgrounds, decoding hidden information, and recovering these barcodes in wide field-of-view images. This method integrates self-attention mechanisms and reparameterization techniques to construct a RepSAU-Net model. Specifically, this paper first introduces a barcode image dataset synthesis strategy adapted for deep learning models, constructing the SBS (Screen Stego Barcodes) dataset, which comprises 2000 wide field-of-view background images (Type A) and 400 information-hidden barcode images (Type B), totaling 30,000 images. Based on this, a network architecture (RepSAU-Net) combining a self-attention mechanism and RepVGG reparameterization technology was designed, with a parameter count of 32.88 M. Experimental results demonstrate that this network performs well in barcode segmentation tasks, achieving an inference speed of 4.88 frames/s, a Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU) of 98.36%, and an Accuracy (Acc) of 94.96%. This research effectively enhances global information capture and feature extraction capabilities without significantly increasing computational load, providing technical support for the application of data-embedded barcodes.