Dynamsoft Developer Blog

Dynamsoft Label Recognizer (DLR) is an SDK that makes it easy to add text recognition function to our apps. We can use it to recognize text on labels, ID cards, etc. In this article, we are going to create a React Native Vision Camera frame processor plugin for DLR to recogni ...

Last week, we created a Xamarin.Forms Barcode QR code scanner for Android and iOS. Xamarin.Forms is not the end for developing cross-platform mobile apps in C#, because .NET MAUI is on the way. Microsoft mentions that .NET MAUI is the evolution of Xamarin.Forms, and it suppor ...

Xamarin.Forms lets .NET developers create cross-platform mobile apps for Android and iOS in C#. This article demonstrates how to scan barcode and QR code from image file and live video stream using Xamarin.Forms Custom Renderers and Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK.

The Ionic framework has shifted its native runtime from Cordova to Capacitor. But we can still create Ionic Angular projects based on Cordova.

The WebView component included in modern mobile operating systems is becoming more and more powerful. For example, it supports showing the camera preview using getUserMedia and has support for WebAssembly, which makes it possible to use Dynamsoft Label Recognizer to create a ...

Google Chrome has getUserMedia support since v53 and WebAssembly support since v57, which makes it possible to use Dynamsoft Barcode Reader to scan barcodes and QR codes in the web context. The WebView component included in modern Android uses Chrome as its backend, so we can ...

.NET MAUI is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to create desktop and mobile applications from a single codebase with C#. It is currently in preview and the production release is slated for Q2 2022. This article goes through the steps to build a .NET MAUI barco ...

The Ionic framework has shifted its native runtime from Cordova to Capacitor. But for compatibility concerns and the fact that there are many good Cordova plugins, we can still use Cordova plugins in an Ionic project.

Normally, we scan barcodes and QR codes from live camera streams or static images. But sometimes, we may need to read barcodes from video files, like scanning the barcodes on a long shelf and evaluating the performance of live scanning. A video contains rich information. A st ...

In the previous article, we’ve given a brief demonstration on how to use the capacitor-plugin-dynamsoft-barcode-reader to create a cross-platform QR code scanner using web technologies with Capacitor. In this article, we are going to take a step further to create an Ionic Rea ...

In the previous series articles, we’ve created a react-native-vision-camera frame processor plugin of Dynamsoft Barcode Reader to scan barcodes. In this article, we are going to build a QR Code scanner using this plugin to better illustrate how to use it.

The MediaDevices.getUserMedia() is the only API used to access cameras from web browsers. Although it is simple, to implement a complete web camera viewer, there are still a lot of work to do. There was no existing JavaScript camera widget available until Dynamsoft released t ...

The previous popular react-native-camera project is now deprecated in favor of react-native-vision-camera. VisionCamera offers new APIs, better performance, improved stability and more features. It has a feature called Frame processors, which makes it easy to integrate extra ...

A week ago, I made an experiment to test the QR code detection performance with YOLOv4 on Android. The inference time of running the YOLOv4 model on CPU is more than 100ms, which does not reach my expectation. Since Android Neural Networks API (NNAPI) provides hardware accele ...

In my previous article, I demonstrated how to implement a simple Android QR code scanner. Based on the codebase, I am going to do something more interesting - integrate the YOLOv4 tiny model that I trained for QR code detection into the Android project. Is YOLO tiny competent ...

Note:

A QR code scanner application primarily consists of two parts: camera preview and QR code scanning. There are many Android QR code scanner apps downloadable in the Google Play Store. However, it is more interesting to create a QR code scanner by yourself than to use an existi ...

As an Android developer, if you want to pursue better application performance - reducing memory copy and garbage collection, you can migrate some of your code from Java/Kotlin to C++. In this article, I take the QR scanner as an example. I will use NDK camera2 API to implemen ...

Although almost every Android phone is equipped with cameras, some Android devices, like TV boxes and kiosks, may not have cameras built-in. An easy way to add extra camera functionality to these devices is by connecting with a USB camera if they support USB-OTG.

Capacitor is an open source native runtime created by the Ionic team for building Web Native apps. We can use it to create cross-platform iOS, Android, and Progressive Web Apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.1 As an alternative to Cordova, Capacitor delivers the same cross-pl ...

Apache Cordova is a tool to create cross-platform apps from standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). Its primary purpose is to provide a bridge for native device API access and to bundle for distribution.1 In this article, we are going to use Cordova to build a ...

If you want to create a QR code scanner for both Windows and Android from a single codebase, what is the best way to do it? If you have read my previous article, Flutter could be your answer. However, it takes time to develop Flutter plugins. The cons of Flutter are that the ...

In this article, I will walk you through how to implement a lightweight Flutter QR code scanner plugin. The plugin supports scanning QR Codes from live video streams of Android phones. You can find the package on pub.dev.

ZeroMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library, aimed at use in distributed or concurrent applications. It supports common messaging patterns (pub/sub, request/reply, client/server and others) over a variety of transports (TCP, in-process, inter-process, multicas ...

There are many QR code tools and SDKs available on the market. For Android development, Google ML Kit is no doubt a good choice, which is free and supports general QR code detection. However, it cannot satisfy the requirement of high-density QR code detection. As a commercial ...

Last week, I built a simple Android application with Dynamsoft camera SDK and OCR SDK to recognize passport MRZ. To facilitate Flutter development, I determined to make a Flutter plugin for wrapping Dynamsoft OCR SDK this week. Since there has been an official Flutter camera ...

Previously, I wrote a post about how to recognize passport MRZ from an image file using C++. In this post, I will create a more productive Android app, which utilizes camera to recognize MRZ.

Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer (DCE) provides high-level APIs for developers to quickly create a camera application, such as a barcode scanner and a text scanner.

In the B4X developing suite, B4J is used to develop desktop apps based on JavaFX or server apps based on Jetty. By default, it cannot be used to create web applications without a server. A third-party library, BANano, makes this possible. It can transpile everything you write ...

In the previous article, we created a Dynamsoft Barcode Reader library for B4X. Here, we are gonna use the library to create a barcode scanner which reads barcodes from the camera stream.

B4X is a set of rapid development tools which can be used to develop apps for all the major mobile and desktop platforms.

Let’s continue discussing scanning QR codes at a distance. In this article, we’ll talk about resolution.

Have you had such an experience that you need to scan a QR code displayed on a screen in the front of a meeting room, but you sat in the back? You opened the barcode scanning app and aimed it at the code, but it just couldn’t read the code. Of course, it is better to make the ...

About two years ago, I wrote an article sharing how to build a Flutter barcode plugin with Dynamsoft Barcode Reader step by step. At that time, Flutter was still under development and only supported Android and iOS. Nowadays, Google has released Flutter 2, which allows develo ...

Camera control and barcode reading are two essential parts of a barcode scanner.

According to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) specification, PDF417 symbology is used for storing personal information on US driver’s license. In this article, I will use Google mobile vision APIs to recognize a driver’s license.  Besides, I wi ...

I think Flutter is vital for developers. Not only it supports fast building Android and iOS apps from a single codebase, but also it is used for building the upcoming Google Fuchsia apps. Like React Native and Cordova, the Flutter ecosystem consists of amounts of plugins, whi ...

Previously, I shared an article demonstrating how to use Camera2 APIs and Dynamsoft Barcode Reader to build a simple Android barcode reader app. In that demo project, the barcode decoding part is implemented in Java, which apparently has room for improvement. If we can get th ...

Assume you apply barcode technology to the logistics conveyor belt for scanning parcels. A problem you may face is how to recognize barcodes from blurred images. Although we can use advanced algorithms to deal with this complicated case, we’d better improve the image quality ...

Building Android camera apps is much more complicated than building iOS camera apps due to the different vendors and hardware specs. Since from API level 21, the old Camera class was deprecated and a brand-new Camera2 class was born. In this post, I want to use the least code ...

Deprecation Note:

.NET developers like Xamarin because they can develop Android and iOS apps in C#. However, if you are not afraid of learning new programming languages, you’d better choose Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS. Unlike React Native, Flutter and Cordova, with Xamarin, you cannot ...

If you have a .jar or a .aar file for distribution, you can publish it to Maven central or jcenter. But the premise is your package has to be open source. If you want to distribute a commercial library, you’d better host a Maven repository yourself. Inspired by STEFFENWELLNER ...

Dynamsoft Android Camera SDK is coming soon. In this article, let’s preview the SDK and learn how to write an Android document scanning app with a few lines of Kotlin code.

Last week I made a warm up for Kotlin, getting started to learn tutorials and reference. Now it is time to take the next step. Since Kotlin is hundred percent compatible with Java, we can use both programming languages without barriers in one project. In this article, I want ...

Last week, I shared how to build a simple React Native component from scratch. Now I want to do something more complicated. I will link Dynamsoft’s Barcode Reader mobile SDK, which was released as an AAR bundle file, to a React Native Barcode project and write some Java code ...

When using React Native to write mobile apps, JavaScript is the primary programming language. However, sometimes, you may want to call a platform API that not supported by existing React Native component or use a third-party Android library that built as an AAR file. For thes ...

Cordova is a mobile application development framework that enables developers to build Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3. It uses web views to render UI elements instead of the platform’s native UI framework. Cordova can be extended to add ...

Flutter, a framework developed by Google, aims to help developers build iOS and Android apps from a single codebase in Dart programming language. It is still an early-stage open-source project. The development environment only works on macOS and Linux (64-bit). I was curious ...

Dynamsoft Barcode SDK for Android is distributed as an AAR file. This article aims to help C# developers, who want to build mobile barcode apps with Xamarin, to use the AAR file in Visual Studio 2015.

No matter whether you are a mobile developer of Android or iOS, your ultimate goal is definitely to publish your apps on Google Play or App Store. Before submitting apps for review, you need to attach some screenshots used for promotion. Furthermore, you can record screen vid ...

When building mobile barcode scanning apps for Android or iOS, developers could either choose open source SDKs – ZXing and ZBar, or some commercial mobile barcode SDKs. If you are an Android developer and have installed Android Play Services SDK level 26 or greater, it is con ...

When making third party libraries and SDKs for Android development, you could build so files, jar files, or aar files. I prefer providing aar files for distribution since aar file is a simple zip file which includes so files, jar files, and other resources.

If you are still focusing on Windows desktop development, it is time to migrate to IoT and mobile technologies that have a big boost in the near future. In this post, let’s take a glimpse of how to build C/C++ “hello world” program for Raspberry Pi and Android on Windows usin ...

Comparing to iOS, one of my favorite Android features is that Android supports USB peripherals. It’s fairly convenient to connect USB devices to Android smartphones via OTG cables. Therefore, no matter whether your Android phones, which probably only have 16G built-in storage ...

Tesseract is a well-known open source OCR engine that released under the Apache License 2.0. In this tutorial, I’d like to share how to build the OCR library for Android, as well as how to implement a simple Android OCR application with it.

If you have a TWAIN-compliant scanner, you can easily control it with Dynamic Web TWAIN or Dynamic .NET TWAIN. Both SDKs can help you create some excellent applications for document scanning and management on PCs. However, have you ever complained that it’s so inconvenient to ...

Java Native Interface (JNI) is the glue between Java and native code such as C, C++, and assembly. With JNI, Java applications are capable of supporting platform-specific features. JNI enables developers to call low-level APIs (e.g. SQL, OpenGL etc.) to make Java application ...

When you are going to purchase a new smartphone like iPhone 6 or Galaxy S5, don’t just throw your old devices away. Via socket connection, we can build a remote monitoring system with obsolete mobile devices instead of purchasing expensive Webcams or wireless cameras. In this ...

In this tutorial, I’d like to share how to write a simple Android application to take a picture, as well as upload the image to a remote PHP server. Let’s get started with a simple Java application.

Barcode scanning, especially QR code scans, are now widely used in various applications. This includes advertisements, newspapers, social networks, signage, and so on. The growth of QR codes is in large part due to the smartphone market’s booming growth. As a result, scanning ...