Reading ID Cards using your camera

Rex Serubii — Thu, 21 May 2020 06:38:19 +0000

Last Year, I made an android application that allows you to scan Passports and ID cards with your camera and extract all the data from the card's machine readable zones; it was pretty fun to optimize and implement!

Link to Code

ultimaterex / Zone-Reader

Simple app that reads identification documents

Zone Reader

Zone Reader is an Android based identification reader application, written in kotlin using firebase and google libraries.

features

Supports reading from most valid ICAO 9303 documents.
Supports saving and sharing read data to common formats.

Libraries

Zone Reader uses a number of open source projects to work properly:

Dexter- Permissions made easy
Firebase - Is what makes this all run.
Glide - The best image loader I've used so far
CameraX - Great camera class by Google
Camera Kit - Fallback camera class

Build for yourself

This app requires you to add your own api key and google-services.json, then build it through android studio

View on GitHub

How I Built It

I ended up writing it fully in Kotlin in android studio, with Sourcetree as my GUI Git tool. I decided to use Firebase for my OCR and the new alpha CameraX builds to allow it to work without any manual input from the user.
My initial builds used the CameraKit library to provide basic camera capture for my use case. Once I had figured out how to use the CameraX library, I decided to move it over as a fallback implementation so I didn't have to deprecate it completely.

Honestly, getting used to the CameraX library with Firebase was a pretty large undertaking since it's still in alpha, but the results were worth it for "on the fly analyzation". I chose to fully write the project in Kotlin, so I could get used to the language.

Some libraries I used while making it:

Dexter- Permissions made easy.
Firebase - What makes this all run.
Glide - The best image loader I've used so far.
CameraX - A great camera class by Google.
Camera Kit - Fallback camera class.

Additional Thoughts

Honestly, building this project gave me a newfound love for Kotlin and how easy it was to transition from Java. I would consider writing in Kotlin again for future projects.

DEV Community: Rex Serubii