advanced_business_card_reader

Business/visiting card reader plugin for Flutter.

  • Native OCR with Google ML Kit Text Recognition v2 (Android/iOS)
  • Native Entity Extraction (beta) for extra phone/email/url signals
  • Dart-side fallback parsing for name/company/phones/emails/websites

What changed

This plugin now uses direct native Google ML Kit through a Flutter MethodChannel:

  • Channel: advanced_business_card_reader
  • Methods:
    • ocrFromFile
    • extractEntities

The public Dart API remains the same:

  • BusinessCardReader.scanFromFile(...)
  • BusinessCardReader.scanAutoFromFile(...)
  • BusinessCardScanResult / BusinessCardData
  • OcrScript values (latin, devanagari, chinese, japanese, korean)

Additive API for double-side cards:

  • BusinessCardReader.scanFromFilesFrontBack(...)
  • BusinessCardReader.scanAutoFromFilesFrontBack(...)
  • BusinessCardSidesResult (front, back, merged)

Install

dependencies:
  advanced_business_card_reader: ^1.0.0

Platform requirements

Android

  • Minimum SDK: 26 (required because of ML Kit Entity Extraction)
  • ML Kit dependencies are provided by the plugin:
    • com.google.mlkit:text-recognition:16.0.1
    • com.google.mlkit:text-recognition-devanagari:16.0.1
    • com.google.mlkit:text-recognition-chinese:16.0.1
    • com.google.mlkit:text-recognition-japanese:16.0.1
    • com.google.mlkit:text-recognition-korean:16.0.1
    • com.google.mlkit:entity-extraction:16.0.0-beta6

If you want a smaller binary, you can fork and remove script-specific recognizers you do not need.

iOS

  • iOS deployment target: 15.5
  • 64-bit devices only (Apple requirement)
  • Pods used by this plugin:
    • GoogleMLKit/TextRecognition 8.0.0
    • GoogleMLKit/TextRecognitionChinese 8.0.0
    • GoogleMLKit/TextRecognitionDevanagari 8.0.0
    • GoogleMLKit/TextRecognitionJapanese 8.0.0
    • GoogleMLKit/TextRecognitionKorean 8.0.0
    • GoogleMLKit/EntityExtraction 8.0.0

Entity Extraction models are downloaded on-device with downloadModelIfNeeded() before annotation.

Usage

import 'package:advanced_business_card_reader/advanced_business_card_reader.dart';

final result = await BusinessCardReader.scanFromFile(
  filePath,
  script: OcrScript.latin,
  defaultIsoCountry: 'IN',
);

print(result.data.name);
print(result.data.company);
print(result.data.phones);
print(result.data.emails);
print(result.data.websites);
print(result.data.rawText);

Auto script:

final result = await BusinessCardReader.scanAutoFromFile(
  filePath,
  preferredScripts: const [
    OcrScript.latin,
    OcrScript.devanagari,
    OcrScript.chinese,
    OcrScript.japanese,
    OcrScript.korean,
  ],
  defaultIsoCountry: 'IN',
);

Double-side card:

final sides = await BusinessCardReader.scanAutoFromFilesFrontBack(
  frontPath: frontImagePath,
  backPath: backImagePath,
  preferredScripts: const [
    OcrScript.latin,
    OcrScript.devanagari,
    OcrScript.chinese,
    OcrScript.japanese,
    OcrScript.korean,
  ],
  defaultIsoCountry: 'IN',
);

print('Front: ${sides.front.data.toJson()}');
print('Back: ${sides.back.data.toJson()}');
print('Merged: ${sides.merged.data.toJson()}');

Parsing behavior

  • OCR text is always parsed by regex + phone_numbers_parser fallback.
  • Entity Extraction is best-effort enhancement only.
  • phones, emails, and websites are merged as a union of:
    • parser results
    • extracted entities
  • If entity extraction fails/model download fails, parser fallback output is still returned.

Unsupported platforms

Web/desktop are not supported. Calls throw UnsupportedError with a clear message.

Example app

The example app includes:

  • Camera
  • Gallery
  • File picker
  • Script selector (Auto + individual scripts)
  • Single-side and double-side scan modes

Run:

cd example
flutter run

License

MIT

Libraries

advanced_business_card_reader