When building Android applications that require barcode scanning capabilities, developers have several SDK options to consider. Two commonly used solutions are Google ML Kit Barcode Scanning and Dynamsoft Barcode Reader. ML Kit is a free, general-purpose machine learning SDK from Google, while Dynamsoft Barcode Reader is a commercial SDK specialized...

Augmented reality (AR) enhances our physical environment by overlaying digital information in real time. This technology transforms traditional barcode scanning from a simple data capture task into an intuitive spatial experience. Imagine walking through a warehouse where AR markers precisely identify each item’s location, or managing hospital supplies with visual...

When evaluating barcode scanning SDKs, you’ll often encounter bold marketing claims: “Scans barcodes from 5 meters away!” or “Industry-leading long-distance scanning!” But here’s the truth that vendors don’t want you to know: distance alone is a meaningless metric. In this article, I’ll show you how to build an iOS app...

Using a phone to scan and print (copy) documents is ideal for convenience, portability, and quick tasks, making it a versatile and practical choice for many users. In this article, we are going to build a web app to scan and print a document on a mobile phone. The following...

In the previous article, we talked about how to scan barcodes using a USB camera on an Android device. In this article, we are going to scan MRZ (machine-readable zone) on passports and ID cards with Dynamsoft Label Recognizer. Here is a video of the result: What you’ll build: A...

While Flutter supports six plaforms — Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and web — the official Flutter camera plugin is limited to just three: Android, iOS, and web. The development pace for the official plugin has been sluggish, with no clear roadmap for desktop support. As a result, creating a...

The litecam Node.js camera SDK lets you capture webcam frames and process them in server-side JavaScript. It wraps the LiteCam C++ camera library as a native Node.js addon built with node-gyp and node-addon-api, and it runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. In this article, you will build the camera addon...

Now that the lightweight C++ camera SDK is complete for Windows, Linux and macOS, we can integrate it into other high-level programming languages. In this article, we will explore how to build a Python camera SDK based on the C++ camera library and use it for multi-barcode scanning with the...

This is the final article in a series on building a lightweight C++ camera library across multiple platforms. We’ve already covered Windows and Linux, and now it’s time to dive into macOS. In this article, we’ll tap into AVFoundation to handle camera capture under the hood and leverage Cocoa for...

In the previous article, we developed a LiteCam library for camera access on Linux. To extend its functionality to Windows, we will leverage the Media Foundation API. This article explores how to use Media Foundation to access the camera on Windows, integrate it with the LiteCam library, and reuse the...

When searching for a camera SDK to develop desktop camera applications on Linux, OpenCV often comes to mind due to its simple APIs for camera access. However, the size of the OpenCV library is big, making it redundant for smaller projects, especially those that only require basic camera functionality. To...

An identity document or ID card is any document that may be used to prove a person’s identity. There are various forms of identity documents: driver’s license, passport and formal identity card. Barcodes and MRZ (machine-readable zones) are often printed on an ID card so that its info can be...

Using the getUserMedia API, we can open cameras on the web with JavaScript. It is supported on most browsers and Chrome for Android has additional support for controlling the camera’s zoom, torch, focus, and so on, giving more possibilities for making a camera web app. In this article, we are...

An IP camera, also known as a network camera, is a digital video tool that sends and receives data via the internet. Unlike its analogue predecessor, the CCTV (Closed Circuit TV), it offers the functionality to view live or recorded footage from anywhere, anytime using a web-based platform or mobile...

Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones). It contains metadata like camera parameters, image dimensions, and image orientation. Most camera sensors have a shape where its width is larger than the height. If...

Camera zoom control on the web is limited to Chromium browsers, so automatically zooming the camera to read a tiny or distant QR code needs either the native zoom constraint or a simulated fallback. Built on dynamsoft-barcode-reader-bundle v11, Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer provides a built-in auto-zoom feature (EF_AUTO_ZOOM) that does this...

Using the getUserMedia API, we can open cameras on the web with JavaScript. Starting from Chrome 87, it is also possible to control the camera’s pan, tilt, and zoom, giving more possibilities for making a camera web app. In this article, we are going to talk about how to control...

As the web platform develops, we can build rich kinds of applications on it. We can build a web app like a barcode scanner or a document scanner using the getUserMedia API to get camera frames for live analysis. While a barcode scanner may not require high resolution, a document...

You can wrap the free Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer JavaScript SDK in a Razor class library to add camera access to ASP.NET Core and Blazor applications. This tutorial builds that library and combines it with RazorBarcodeLibrary — which is built on the Dynamsoft JavaScript Barcode SDK — to create a real-time...

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It provides an API named getUserMedia to access the device’s cameras and microphones. Sometimes, we may need to record a video to save the content...

An Android document scanner in Jetpack Compose can combine three pieces: a REST service for physical document scanners, the system camera for mobile capture, and Dynamsoft Document Normalizer for document boundary detection and perspective correction. This article builds such a Compose app end to end. What you’ll build: a Jetpack...

Dynamsoft Document Normalizer is an SDK to detect the boundary of documents and runs perspective transformation to get a normalized document image. In this article, we are going to build an iOS document scanner using Dynamsoft Document Normalizer and AVFoundation. A demo video of the final result: The scanning process:...

You can read barcodes and QR codes from video files on Android in two ways: decode frames while the video plays, or grab every frame with FFmpeg and decode it offline. This article builds a Kotlin app that records videos with CameraX and then reads barcodes from the recorded files...

The MediaDevices.getUserMedia() API is the standard way to access cameras from web browsers. While it’s relatively straightforward, building a complete web camera viewer still requires significant effort. Until recently, there were no ready-to-use JavaScript camera widgets. However, with the release of the Dynamsoft Camera Enhancer library, implementing a browser-based camera...

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...

Cameras are now ubiquitous in our life. Every mobile phone has built-in cameras which can shoot nice photos. As for document scanning, there is document camera (also called overhead scanner) which is adjustable and has high resolution. Image source: https://www.amazon.com/Conferencing-Recording-Classroom-Real-time-Definition/dp/B08V4WLPX1/ A document camera has the following benefits: Users don’t have...

Let’s continue discussing scanning QR codes at a distance. In this article, we’ll talk about resolution. What you’ll learn: why the live video stream limits how far a QR code can be read, how capturing at the camera’s highest resolution or taking a photo extends the range, and how image...

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....

You can build an Android barcode scanner with CameraX by combining its preview and image-analysis use cases with Dynamsoft Barcode Reader for decoding: CameraX delivers the camera frames, and the Capture Vision engine (com.dynamsoft:barcodereaderbundle:11.6.2000) decodes barcodes from the NV21 frame buffer. Camera control and barcode reading are the two essential...

Dynamic Web TWAIN has added some exciting features related to the mobile platform since its version 16. Document capturing via mobile cameras, 16.0 PDF Rasterizer mobile edition, 16.0 LoadImageEx supports mobile platform, 16.1 Acquiring images from a remote scanner, 16.1 The scanDocument API which makes it easy to call a...