Contrary to the 2 APIs we covered earlier, there is no cloud variant of this API albeit, all the processing happens on the device itself.

Hence as a result, this API is free of any cost!

Yes, you heard me right, there is no charge for using this API whatsoever since all the processing happens on the device itself.

One more thing about this API is that it also works when your device isn’t connected to the internet! #buildingForTheNextBillions

The code for the sample app above can be found over here, feel free to fork it and follow along :

So without any delay, let’s get started!

Setup Firebase in your project and add the vision dependency

This is a simple one, simply setup firebase in your project. You can find a good tutorial here.

In order to use this API, you also need to add the following dependencies.

Implement Camera functionality in your app

The Vision API needs an image to extract the data from, so either create an app that lets you upload images from the gallery or create an app that uses the Camera APIs to click a picture and use it instead.

I found this library to be pretty handy and easy to use instead of the framework Camera APIs so this is what I end up using.

The Vision API needs an image to extract the data from, so either create an app that lets you upload images from the gallery or create an app that uses the Camera APIs to click a picture and use it instead. I found this library to be pretty handy and easy to use instead of the framework Camera APIs so this is what I end up using. Use the Bitmap to make the API call

If you used the library above, it directly provides you with a Bitmap of the captured image which you can use to make an API call.

In the above code snippet, we first create a FirebaseVisionImage from the bitmap.

Followed by that, we create an instance of FirebaseVisionBarcodeDetector which is used to recognize barcodes in a supplied Image.

Lastly we pass the Image to the detectInImage() method and let the detector detect text from the image.

We have a success and a failure callback which contains a list of FirebaseVisionBarcode objects containing all the detected barcodes and an exception respectively.

Further, we can loop over the above list and get information contained in each and every Barcode that was detected.

This API can also detect the type of data contained in the scanned Barcode which you can use to handle every type of barcode differently.

For example, you may want to open a browser in case the Barcode contained a URL and make a call if it contained a phone number.

You can refer to the code pasted below to see this in action.

All the available types are outlined in the BarCodeValueType Interface.

If you want to play around with the app shown in the screenshots, you can build it from the GitHub repository I linked above and it should work well after adding it to your Firebase Project.

And that’ll be all for this one, I’ll be off to exploring the remaining MLKit APIs so expect articles for them soon enough!

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