Home Android: mobile vision APIs

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Android Mobile Vision restores operation and adds Text API

Posted by Michael Sipe, Product Manager

As an important framework for finding objects in photos and video, Mobile Vision
operation for Android devices is restored in Google Play Services v9.2.

This new version of Google Play Services fixes a download issue in Google Play
Services v.9.0 that caused a service outage. See href="https://developers.google.com/vision/release-notes">release notes for
details.

We’re also pleased to announce the Text API, a new component for Android Mobile
Vision.

The Text API’s optical character recognition technology reads Latin character
text (e.g. English, Spanish, German, French, etc.) in photos and returns the
text as well as the organizational structure (paragraphs, lines, words). Mobile
apps can now:

Organize photos that contain text
Automate tedious data entry for credit cards, receipts, and business cards
Translate documents (along with the href="https://cloud.google.com/translate/">Cloud Translate API)
Keep track of real objects, such as reading the numbers on subway trains
Provide accessibility features

If you want to get started quickly, you can try our href="http://g.co/codelabs/mobile-vision-ocr">codelab which will get Android
developers reading text with their apps in under an hour.

Like the Mobile Vision Face and Barcode components, the Text API runs on-device
and is suitable for real-time applications. For more information, check out the
Mobile Vision Developer
site.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Barcode Detection in Google Play services

bar code Featured Google Services mobile vision APIs

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

With the release of Google Play services 7.8 we’re excited to announce that we’ve added new Mobile Vision APIs which provides the Barcode Scanner API to read and decode a myriad of different barcode types quickly, easily and locally.

Barcode detection

Classes for detecting and parsing bar codes are available in the com.google.android.gms.vision.barcode namespace. The BarcodeDetector class is the main workhorse -- processing Frame objects to return a SparseArray<Barcode> types.

The Barcode type represents a single recognized barcode and its value. In the case of 1D barcode such as UPC codes, this will simply be the number that is encoded in the barcode. This is available in the rawValue property, with the detected encoding type set in the format field.

For 2D barcodes that contain structured data, such as QR codes, the valueFormat field is set to the detected value type, and the corresponding data field is set. So, for example, if the URL type is detected, the constant URL will be loaded into the valueFormat, and the URL property will contain the desired value. Beyond URLs, there are lots of different data types that the QR code can support -- check them out in the documentation here.

When using the API, you can read barcodes in any orientation. They don’t always need to be straight on, and oriented upwards!

Importantly, all barcode parsing is done locally, making it really fast, and in some cases, such as PDF-417, all the information you need might be contained within the barcode itself, so you don’t need any further lookups.

You can learn more about using the API by checking out the sample on GitHub. This uses the Mobile Vision APIs along with a Camera preview to detect both faces and barcodes in the same image.

Supported Bar Code Types

The API supports both 1D and 2D bar codes, in a number of sub formats.

For 1D Bar Codes, these are:

EAN-13

EAN-8

UPC-A

UPC-E

Code-39

Code-93

Code-128

ITF

Codabar

For 2D Bar Codes, these are:

QR Code

Data Matrix

PDF 417

Learn More

It’s easy to build applications that use bar code detection using the Barcode Scanner API, and we’ve provided lots of great resources that will allow you to do so. Check them out here:

Follow the Code Lab

Read the Mobile Vision Documentation

Explore the sample

Join the discussion on

+Android Developers