In an effort to increase the data capacity of one-dimensional symbology, 2D barcodes have been proposed a decade ago. In this paper, we present an effective 2D barcode detection algorithm from gray-level images, especially for the handheld 2D barcode recognition system. To locate the symbol inside the image, a criteria based on the block contrast is adopted, and a gray-scale projection with sub-pixel operation is utilized to segment the symbol precisely from the region of interest(ROI). Finally, the segmented ROI is normalized using the inverse perspective transformation for the following decoding processes. We also introduce the post-processing steps for decoding the QR-code. The proposed method ensures high performances under various lighting/printing conditions and strong perspective deformations. Experiments shows that our method is very robust and efficient in detecting the code area for the various types of 2D barcodes in real time.