Reducing OCR time using blink ID

Question

We have been using blink id as the OCR tool in android. But when there is ambient light , the third party library takes too long to scan because the documents are laminated. Does anybody know a way to reduce scanning time by probably locking the focus of the camera.

Answer 1

BlinkID can use one or more recognisers to perform ID scanning. The scanning time depends on number of currently active recognisers (the more are active, the longer the scanning time is). Which ID are you trying to scan?

BlinkID currently supports US Driver License barcodes (back side), UK Driver Licence (front side), German Driver Licence (front side), Malaysian MyKad ID Card (front side) and generic Machine Readable Travel Document (passports and ID cards containing Machine Readable Zone).

If you are simply trying to perform general purpose OCR of camera frame with BlinkID segment scan recogniser (which is also available in BlinkOCR), then you can tweak OCR settings if you use Raw parser: you can use method setOcrEngineOptions to set generic OCR engine options which define which fonts and characters are allowed, how much text is expected, what are minimum and maximum height of text lines and much more.

BlinkID uses automatic camera management and tries to keep image as sharp as possible on given device to get the best possible scan result. However, on some android devices the camera driver behaves differently when used within native camera app and via Android Camera API. Issues like these are specific to specific devices or device vendors and BlinkID cannot always have workarounds for it.

And last, but not least: if you are trying to scan a document which has a glare due to receiving direct light, please try scanning under more evenly lighted conditions - at the moment BlinkID cannot remove glare effect from laminated documents.

Disclaimer: I work for MicroBlink, the company behind BlinkID.