Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer for Your Website

Allow your website to easily control cameras on desktop and mobile devices.

Once integrated, your users can open your website in a browser, access their cameras to stream live video and acquire realtime frames.

Example Usage

See how Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer helps in camera control and video recognition:

Barcode scanning from video stream: check Dynamsoft Barcode Reader JS User Guide

MRZ scanning and OCR from video stream: check Dynamsoft Label Recognizer JS User Guide

In this guide, you will learn step by step on how to integrate the Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer SDK into your website.

Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer for Your Website

Getting Started

Include the SDK

Use a CDN

The simplest way to include the SDK is to use either the jsDelivr or UNPKG CDN.

jsDelivr

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer@3.3.0/dist/dce.js"></script>

UNPKG

<script src="https://unpkg.com/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer@3.3.0/dist/dce.js"></script>

In some rare cases, you might not be able to access the CDN. If this happens, you can use https://download2.dynamsoft.com/dce/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer-js/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer-js-3.3.0/dist/dce.js

Host the SDK yourself

Besides using the CDN, you can also download the SDK and host it locally.

The following shows a few ways to download the SDK.

From the website

Download the JavaScript Package
yarn
```
yarn add dynamsoft-camera-enhancer
```

npm

npm install dynamsoft-camera-enhancer --save

Depending on how you downloaded the SDK and where you put it. You can typically include it like this:

<script src="/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer-js-3.3.0/dist/dce.js"></script>

<script src="/node_modules/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer/dist/dce.js"></script>

import { CameraEnhancer } from 'dynamsoft-camera-enhancer';

Interact with the SDK

Create a `CameraEnhancer` object

To use the SDK, we need to create a CameraEnhancer object first.

let cameraEnhancer = await Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.createInstance();

Configure the `CameraEnhancer` object

As shown in the code snippet below, before opening the video stream, we need to decide where to place the UI. By default, a full-page-size UI element will be created over the current page.

<!-- Define an element to hold the UI element -->
<div id="enhancerUIContainer" style="width:100%;height:500px;"></div>
<script>
  (async () => {
      let cameraEnhancer = await Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.createInstance();
      await cameraEnhancer.setUIElement(Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.defaultUIElementURL);
      document.getElementById("enhancerUIContainer").appendChild(cameraEnhancer.getUIElement());
      await cameraEnhancer.open();
  })();
</script>

Customize the UI

The built-in UI of the CameraEnhancer object is defined in the file dist/dce.ui.html . There are a few ways to customize it:

Modify the file dist/dce.ui.html directly.

This option is only possible when you host this file on your own web server instead of using a CDN.
Copy the file dist/dce.ui.html to your project, modify it and use the the API defaultUIElementURL to set it as the default UI.

// To make sure the following line takes effect, put it before the API `open()` is called.
Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.defaultUIElementURL = "THE-URL-TO-THE-FILE";

Append the default UI element to your page as shown in Configure the CameraEnhancer object, customize it if necessary.

<!-- Define an element to hold the UI element -->
<div id="enhancerUIContainer" style="width:100%;height:500px;"></div>
<script>
  (async () => {
    let cameraEnhancer = await Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.createInstance();
    //  Sets the internally built UI element
    await cameraEnhancer.setUIElement(Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.defaultUIElementURL);
    // Gets the internally built UI element and add it to the page.
    document.getElementById("enhancerUIContainer").appendChild(cameraEnhancer.getUIElement());
    await cameraEnhancer.open();
    // The following line hides the close button
    document.getElementsByClassName("dce-btn-close")[0].style.display = "none";
  })();
</script>

Build the UI element into your own web page and specify it with the API setUIElement(HTMLElement).
- Embed only the video
```
<div id="enhancerUIContainer" style="width:100%;height:100%;">
    <div class="dce-video-container" style="position:relative;width:100%;height:500px;"></div>
</div>
<script>
    (async () => {
        let cameraEnhancer = await Dynamsoft.DCE.CameraEnhancer.createInstance();
        await cameraEnhancer.setUIElement(document.getElementById("enhancerUIContainer"));
        await cameraEnhancer.open();
    })();
</script>
```
The video element will be created and appended to the DIV element with the class dce-video-container, make sure the class name is the same. Besides, the CSS property position of the DIV element must be either relative, absolute, fixed, or sticky.
- Add the camera list and resolution list. If the class names for these lists match the default ones, dce-sel-camera and dce-sel-resolution , the SDK will automatically populate the lists and handle the camera/resolution switching.
```
<select class="dce-sel-camera"></select>
```
```
<select class="dce-sel-resolution"></select>
```
By default, only 3 hard-coded resolutions (1920 x 1080, 1280 x 720, 640 x 480), are populated as options. You can show a customized set of options by hardcoding them.
```
<select class="dce-sel-resolution">
    <option class="dce-opt-gotResolution" value="got"></option>
    <option data-width="1280" data-height="720">1280x720</option>
    <option data-width="1920" data-height="1080">1920x1080</option>
</select>
```
Generally, you need to provide a resolution that the camera supports. However, in case a camera does not support the specified resolution, it usually uses the cloest supported resolution. As a result, the selected resolution may not be the actual resolution. In this case, add an option with the class name dce-opt-gotResolution (as shown above) and the SDK will then use it to show the actual resolution.

Hosting the SDK

Step One: Deploy the dist folder

Once you have downloaded the SDK, you can locate the “dist” directory and copy it to your project (usually as part of your website / web application). The following shows some of the files in this directory:

dce.js // The main SDK file
dce.mjs // For using the SDK as a module (<script type="module">)
dce.ui.html // Defines the default UI

Step Two: Configure the Server

Enable HTTPS

To use the SDK, you must access your website / web application via a secure HTTPS connection. This is due to browser security restrictions which only grant camera video streaming access to a secure context.

For convenience, self-signed certificates are allowed during development and testing. Or use “http://localhost”.

Step Three: Include the SDK from the server

Now that the SDK is hosted on your server, you can include it accordingly.

<script src="https://www.yourwebsite.com/PATH-TO-THE-SDK/dynamsoft-camera-enhancer/dist/dce.js"></script>

FAQ

Can I open the web page directly from the hard drive?

Yes, for simple testing purposes, it’s ok to open the file directly from the hard drive (file://). However, you might encounter some issues in doing so (like unable to access the camera, etc.). The recommendation is to deploy this page to your web server and run it over HTTPS or use “http://localhost” during development.

If you don’t have a ready-to-use web server but have a package manager like npm or yarn, you can set up a simple HTTP server in minutes. Check out http-server on npm or yarn.

Why can’t I use my camera?

If you open the web page as http:// , the camera may not work and you see the following error in the browser console:

[Deprecation] getUserMedia() no longer works on insecure origins. To use this feature, you should consider switching your application to a secure origin, such as HTTPS. See https://goo.gl/rStTGz for more details.

In Safari 12 the equivalent error is:

Trying to call getUserMedia from an insecure document.

You get this error because the API getUserMedia requires HTTPS to access the camera.

To make sure your web application can access the camera, please configure your web server to support HTTPS. The following links may help.

NGINX: Configuring HTTPS servers
IIS: Create a Self Signed Certificate in IIS
Tomcat: Setting Up SSL on Tomcat in 5 minutes
Node.js: npm tls

API Documentation

You can check out the detailed documentation about the APIs of the SDK at https://www.dynamsoft.com/camera-enhancer/docs/programming/javascript/api-reference/index.html.

Release Notes

Learn about what are included in each release at https://www.dynamsoft.com/camera-enhancer/docs/programming/javascript/release-note/index.html.

Next Steps

Now that you have got the SDK integrated, you can choose to move forward in the following directions

Learn how to make use of the Shape Drawing Feature.
Check out the official samples on Github.
Learn about the available APIs.