Symbion Medical Systems Sari is a company active in the immuno-heamatology field. Symbion is at present developing a machine to analyze blood groups. In relation with these analyses, test tubes are used to introduce blood samples. The samples have a reference to the patient through a barcode placed on the test tube. However the barcode can be partially erased or scratched by the nurse or whoever has handled the test tubes. This can result in an unreadable code by the usual infrared barcode reader. Based on this problematic and by a request from Symbion Medical to Idiap Research Institute, Symbion Medical wanted to know if a development could be made by Idiap Research Institute to resolve this problem using a computer vision based approach.