In 2007-9 I developed some software for reading datamatrix patterns. Often these patterns were difficult to read, being indented into scratched surfaces with al

In 2007-9 I developed some software for reading datamatrix patterns. Often these patterns were difficult to read, being indented into scratched surfaces with all kinds of reflectance properties, fuzzy chemically etched markings and so on. I used a GA to fine tune various parameters of the vision algorithms to give the best results on a database of 300 images having known properties. Parameters were things like downsampling resolution, RANSAC parameters, amount of erosion and dilation, low pass filtering radius, and a few others. Running the optimisation over several days this produced results which were about 20% better than naive values on a test set of images unseen during the optimisation phase. This system was completely written from scratch, and I didn't use any other libraries. I'm not opposed to using such things, provided that they give a reliable result, but you have to be careful about license compatibility and code portability issues.