Patent ID: 6976630

Claim:
A bar-code reader comprising: an optical scanner that optically scans a bar code to obtain signal strength of light reflected from black bars and white bars of the bar code; an extracting unit that extracts edge data, which includes a plurality of edges and the signal strength of which changes corresponding to a change from a black bar to a white bar and vice versa; an edge-emphasizing unit that emphasizes edge data of an edge that satisfies a predetermined condition; a ternary judgment unit that makes a ternary judgment of each edge based on the edge emphasized to obtain a ternarizing result; and a decoder that decodes bar-code characters from the ternarizing result, wherein the edge-emphasizing unit emphasizes an amplitude of the edge, when the edge data is expressed in a waveform with time on a horizontal axis and amplitude on a vertical axis, and when an edge having a frequency of a module greater than a predetermined threshold value is detected, and causes a change in emphasizing characteristics that emphasize the amplitude of the edge, based on the frequency of the module.