1. A method of operation for a processor-based device to identify a machine-readable symbol in an image, the processor-based device including at least one processor and at least one nontransitory processor-readable storage medium, the method comprising: receiving, in the at least one nontransitory processor-readable storage medium, a plurality of training images, each training image corresponding to one of a plurality of machine-readable symbols; generating, by the at least one processor, a distortion model for the training images; generating, by the at least one processor, a plurality of distorted image signals based at least in part on the distortion model and the training images, each of the plurality of distorted image signals corresponding to one of the machine-readable symbols; transforming, by the at least one processor, the plurality of distorted image signals from a signal space into a first transform space; extracting, by the at least one processor, classification features from the transformed distorted image signals in the first transform space; and training, by the at least one processor, a first machine-readable symbol classifier based at least in part on the extracted classification features.