Dynamsoft Developer Blog

In the previous article, we demonstrated how to build a React Native QR code scanner using Vision Camera and the Dynamsoft Barcode Reader frame processor plugin. In this article, we are going to talk about how to build a barcode scanner using Expo. Expo is an open-source platform for making...

In the previous article, we built a Capacitor document scanning plugin based on the Dynamsoft Document Normalizer SDK. In this article, we are going to build a document scanner in Angular using the Ionic framework. Demo video of the final result: The app can take a photo or load an...

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. Using Capacitor plugins, we can use JavaScript to interface directly with native APIs. In this article,...

In the previous article, we’ve built a document normalization React Native Vision Camera frame processor based on Dynamsoft Document Normalizer SDK. In this article, we are going to use it to build a React Native document scanning demo app. This article is Part 2 in a 2-Part Series. Part 1...

Mobile document scanning apps bring convenience to users by allowing them to scan travel documents, ID cards, passports and other types of documents on the go. This article aims to help C# developers, who do not have the background in computer vision, to build a mobile document scanning app for...

Dynamsoft Document Normalizer is an SDK to detect the boundary of documents and runs perspective transformation to get a normalized document image. A normalized image can be used for further processing such as OCR. In this article, we are going to create a React Native Vision Camera frame processor plugin...

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. Using Capacitor plugins, we can use JavaScript to interface directly with native APIs. In this article,...

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. Using Capacitor plugins, we can use JavaScript to interface directly with native APIs. In this article,...

Ionic is a popular framework to build cross-platform mobile web apps. In this article, we are going to build an Ionic Angular app based on Cordova to scan the MRZ codes which are often found on passports. The JavaScript version of Dynamsoft Label Recognizer is used to provide the ability...

Quasar is a Vue.js-based framework, which allows web developers to quickly create responsive websites/apps, while Capacitor is a runtime for creating cross-platform iOS, Android, and Progressive Web Apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. In this article, we are going to use the two to create a QR code scanner using...

Dynamsoft Document Normalizer is an SDK to detect the boundary of documents and runs perspective transformation to get a normalized document image. A normalized image can be used for further processing such as OCR. In this article, we are going to create an Android document scanner using Dynamsoft Document Normalizer...

Previously, 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 supports both mobile and desktop development....

If you try to port Xamarin mobile projects to .NET MAUI, you will find there is no problem with packages built for Xamarin Android, but packages built for Xamarin iOS are incompatible. To tackle this issue, you need to change target framework to .NET 6 and rebuild related packages. Dynamsoft...

In the previous series of articles, we’ve created a react-native-vision-camera frame processor plugin of Dynamsoft Label Recognizer to recognize text. In this article, we are going to build an MRZ scanner using this plugin to better illustrate how to use it. MRZ stands for machine-readable zone, which is usually at...

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...

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. In the end of this article, we will also demonstrate...

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 Ionic React. In this article, we are going to use Ionic Vue to create such a QR code scanner. Screenshots of the final results: Home Scanning Home...

The Ionic framework has shifted its native runtime from Cordova to Capacitor. But we can still create Ionic Angular projects based on Cordova. In this article, we are going to create an Ionic Angular QR code scanning app based on Cordova using the cordova-plugin-dynamsoft-barcode-reader and the ionic wrapper. Preview of...

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 text scanner to recognize text like passports’ machine-readable...

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 also run a barcode...

.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 barcode and QR code...

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. We can directly use Cordova plugins with the cordova object, but there is a...

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 state-of-art mobile phone can...

Dynamic Web TWAIN has a new scanDocument API since v17.2, which makes it easy to capture documents using mobile cameras with its document border detection feature. Along with the RemoteScan feature that connects physical document scanners, we can now build a decent mobile document scanner with web technologies. In this...

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 React QR Code Scanner. A preview of the...

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. A preview of the final result: The app consists...

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 the Camera Enhancer library recently. Now,...

The previous popular react-native-camera project is now deprecated in favor of react-native-vision-camera. Vision Camera offers new APIs, better performance, improved stability and more features. It has a feature called Frame processors, which makes it easy to integrate extra image processing abilities. We are going to create a frame processor plugin...

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 acceleration for TensorFlow Lite...

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 for real-time...

Note: This article talks about how to build a QR code scanner native UI component for React Native. If you need to use Dynamsoft Barcode Reader in a React Native project for production, please use the official Dynamsoft Capture Vision SDK. React Native is an open-source UI software framework made...

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 existing one. This...

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 implement the...

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. Starting from Android 9, the Android...

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-platform benefits, but with a more...

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 QR code scanner...

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...

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. Supported symbologies include QR Codes, linear codes, PDF417, and more. This article...

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, multicast, WebSocket and more), making inter-process messaging as simple as inter-thread messaging. 1 ZeroMQ can be used...

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 barcode SDK, Dynamsoft...

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 plugin available for download on...

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. This article is Part 2 in a 8-Part Series. Part 1 - Passport MRZ Recognition with...

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. The API surface works across most Android and iOS devices. While it leverages the capabilities of Android’s Camera2 and iOS’s AVCaptureSession, it is much easier to...

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 B4J to...

This article is Part 2 in a 3-Part Series. Part 1 - Cross-Platform Barcode Reader with B4X Part 2 - B4X Live Barcode Scanner | Scan QR Codes From Camera Stream Part 3 - Web Barcode Reader using B4X In the previous article, we created a Dynamsoft Barcode Reader library...

B4X is a set of rapid development tools which can be used to develop apps for all the major mobile and desktop platforms. It has four products: B4A, B4i, B4J and B4R, which aim at Android, iOS, Java (desktop with JavaFX, server and Raspberry Pi) and Arduino development. Apart from...

Let’s continue discussing scanning QR codes at a distance. In this article, we’ll talk about resolution. Using the camera’s highest resolution Most of the current smartphones’ video stream resolution can be set to 1080P (Full HD) and many of them support 4K (Ultra HD) video capturing. The higher the 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....

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 developers to build apps for...

Camera control and barcode reading are two essential parts of a barcode scanner. Dynamsoft Barcode Reader is an advanced barcode reader with an easy-to-use Android library. The implementation of the barcode reading function is simple and straightforward. Making a good camera app, however, is not easy. In Android, there are...

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 will create a similar Android barcode reader app to extract...

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, which empower Flutter apps,...

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 the pointer to the native...

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 as possible as we can. A...

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 to...

Deprecation Note: Please use the Dynamsoft Capture Vision SDK in your React Native project to scan barcodes for production. If you are using React Native, you can quickly create a camera app with React Native Camera. In addition, React Native Camera component supports barcode scanning, face detection, and text recognition....

.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 create one codebase for both...

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’s article,...

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. Features Automatic border detection Trimming and perspective correction Image enhancement iOS image processing Offline I/O and PDF Customizable UI...

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 to...

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 as...

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 these cases, you need to...

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 more functionalities with plugins. There are...

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 about how Flutter performs comparing to Xamarin...

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. Dynamsoft Xamarin Barcode SDK is Available on NuGet SDK: Xamarin.Dynamsoft.Barcode.Android Examples: https://github.com/dynamsoft-dbr/xamarin If you want to...

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 video in order to...

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 convenient to create Android...

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. What’s inside aar file? /AndroidManifest.xml (mandatory) /classes.jar (mandatory)...

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...

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, have SD card slot or not, it’s still...

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. Ads Powered by Dynamsoft Tesseract Android Tools...

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 stay with your scanners and...

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 more powerful with higher performance. For example, we can...

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 article, I’d like to...

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. [caption id=”attachment_3447” align=”aligncenter” width=”600”] Ads Powered by Dynamsoft[/caption] Uploading Images with Java Download the...

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 technology tends to be more and more useful...