Faster checkout with invisible barcodes? New Seasons will give it a try

Nearly everything on supermarket shelves comes with a barcode. Those black-and-white lines make checkout straightforward and reliably consistent. Not necessarily fast, though. Those tiny barcodes often take a second or two for scanners to locate, even with skilled checkers running them across the scanner. Upscale Portland grocery chain New Seasons is about to try something different. It's signing up to use technology from Beaverton-based Digimarc Corp. that embeds invisible barcodes all over a product. They're not visible to human eyes, but scanners equipped with new technology find Digmarc's barcodes right away, because they're everywhere on the packaging.