Her research in document analysis has includes developing models of the degradations produced during document image acquisition, and analyzing the defects that can be produced by the models, ballot image processing, handwritten Indic script recognition, and historical document image processing. Some of this work was featured in a TEDxBoise talk (available on YouTube).
Professor Barney has worked on numerous cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional, national and international project teams. Her expertise has given her invitations as a paid guest scientist at the NATO Saclant Center in Italy, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris, France, and most recently LORIA in Nancy France and the Technical University Dortmund in Germany. Professor Barney co-authored a textbook on machine learning. She has received NSF, NASA, and industry funding, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award.