Document Scanner SDK Frequently Asked Questions

The Pixelnetica Document Scanner Software Development Kit (DSSDK) is a toolkit that turns any smartphone or tablet into a document scanner. Using computer vision, it produces high-quality scans optimized for automated processing.

Key features include:

• Automatic document capture with interactive user guidance.
• Automatic orientation detection, rotation, cropping, and advanced color conversion (binarization).
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) support for over 100 languages.
• Exporting capabilities in various formats including images, text, or layered PDF with sophisticated compression techniques.

These functions come as ready-to-use UI components. DSSDK runs entirely offline, so document data stays on the device.

Today, almost every user carries a camera-enabled mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet. Mobile document scanning software uses these devices to deliver scans comparable to traditional hardware scanners. Mobile scanning software is always readily available, eliminating the expense and inconvenience of purchasing dedicated scanning hardware. Furthermore, data captured this way can be fed into corporate back-end systems, improving workflow.

Choosing the right document scanning software should primarily focus on generating high-quality scans compatible with your corporate systems. Key considerations include:

• Quality: The software should reliably produce crisp, clear, and legible scans, even under challenging lighting conditions or when dealing with poor-quality originals.
• Compatibility: Check that the software integrates with your existing development platforms, frameworks, and tools.
• Features: Beyond basic scanning capabilities, consider advanced features for your specific needs, such as customized document formats, adaptive color profiles (color, grayscale, black-and-white), and export options including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and advanced PDF formats with text layers.
• Security: With increasing regulatory requirements (GDPR, CCPA), software must securely handle data. DSSDK, for instance, does all processing on-device and offline, which maintains compliance with strict security standards.
• Pricing: Transparent, predictable, and scalable pricing models are essential. DSSDK offers a royalty-free licensing model with a fixed annual fee, unlimited usage, and no user, installation, or scan limitations.

Integrating DSSDK into your product is straightforward thanks to its ready-to-use UI components, such as the interactive camera interface for automatic document capture and intuitive manual editing tools for precise cropping and rotation adjustments. For integration details, refer to our documentation and explore the sample application source code.

For further assistance or queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly.

While many free and open-source solutions exist, these often lack scanning quality and complete functionality, and need extra development for UI elements and format support. Investing in a professional solution like Pixelnetica Document Scanner SDK significantly reduces development time and ongoing support efforts by providing ready-made UI components, full documentation, and ready-to-use OCR features, eliminating the need for extensive custom coding.

Explore our Document Scanner solution, see it in our demo application, or try it in your application today.

Pixelnetica Document Scanner SDK currently supports the following platforms:

• Android
• Apple iOS
• .NET MAUI
• Xamarin

A free demo application (complete with source code) and trial are available to get you started immediately.

Traditional imaging software development kits (SDKs) primarily target general photo manipulations, such as format conversions, simple rotations, brightness and contrast adjustments, and basic binarization. While these functions are sufficient for standard image processing, they fall short when handling mobile-captured photographs of paper documents. Such images often require higher-quality reproduction for applications like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), document archiving, digital documentation, and more.

Photographs taken with mobile device cameras typically suffer from various issues, including distortions due to camera angles, inconsistent lighting conditions, shadows, glare, motion blur from shaking hands, out-of-focus shots, and user errors such as improper document positioning within the camera’s viewfinder. These factors significantly degrade image quality, affecting the effectiveness of OCR and other document-based tasks.

Pixelnetica™ Document Scanning SDK addresses these specific challenges by providing advanced preprocessing features optimized for documents captured with mobile devices:

• Efficient Multi-language Text Recognition: Accurately recognizes text in over 100 languages, with full on-device processing.
• Flexible Document Sharing: Easily share documents as “sandwiched” PDFs (containing both the scanned image and selectable text) or as plain TXT files for - straightforward text extraction.
• Smart Crop Technology: Precisely detects and crops document boundaries.
• Automatic Distortion Correction: Corrects 2D geometric and 3D perspective distortions automatically.
• Automatic Orientation Detection and Rotation: Automatically detects and corrects document orientation.
• Enhanced Noise Reduction: Reduces digital noise to significantly improve image clarity.
• Brightness and Contrast Normalization: Mitigates shadows and glare, enhancing document readability.
• Adaptive Binarization: Optimized specifically for OCR, preserving maximum text detail.
• Adaptive Color Processing Profiles: Automatically adjusts color processing based on document content, ensuring optimal readability.
• Secure On-Device Processing: Fully automated processing compliant with GDPR and CCPA, ensuring secure handling of sensitive data.
• Ready-to-use UI Components: A set of customizable UI components for common document scanning flows, which cuts development time and cost.

By leveraging these advanced preprocessing features, Pixelnetica™ Document Scanning SDK produces images that match the high-quality standard of traditional flatbed scanners, significantly enhancing OCR accuracy and the efficiency of paperless workflows.

Yes. All image processing happens on the device, so no images or sensitive data are sent to external servers.

This guarantees full compliance with major data privacy regulations including GDPR, CCPA,CPRA, etc.

Your users’ data stays private, secure, and fully under your application’s control, providing peace of mind and minimizing compliance risks.

Digitizing documents with traditional scanners typically results in clear, evenly-lit, and well-aligned images, benefiting from high-speed scanning and duplexing capabilities. These qualities play a crucial role in ensuring OCR accuracy by minimizing errors and enhancing text extraction reliability.

In contrast, images captured using mobile cameras often encounter challenges like shaky hands, poor lighting, shadows, glare, and various geometric distortions. These factors significantly impact the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), leading to increased error rates or making OCR processing impossible.

To achieve the best OCR results from mobile-captured documents, consider these key image preprocessing steps, each building upon the previous to minimize errors and enhance text recognition more effectively:

• Geometric distortions correction: 2D and 3D perspective distortions (e.g., trapezoidal) should be identified and corrected for accurate text extraction and fewer OCR errors.
• Image Alignment and Rotation: Automatically correct random angles for proper text orientation.
• Noise Reduction: Digital noise caused by camera sensors should be detected and minimized.
• Shadows and Glare Elimination: Properly mitigate shadows, glare, and background artifacts.
• Document Background Cleaning: Remove unwanted background textures, color cast, etc. to enhance text clarity and readability.
• Adaptive Binarization: Convert images into optimized black-and-white or grayscale formats, preserving maximum detail for OCR accuracy.

Pixelnetica™ Document Scanning SDK incorporates all these advanced preprocessing capabilities, including distortion correction, noise reduction, shadow elimination, background cleaning, and adaptive binarization, delivering exceptional OCR-ready results directly on mobile devices. Optimized for use with smartphones, tablets, and document cameras, Document Scanning SDK offers broad cross-platform compatibility and reliable performance, with clarity and legibility comparable to traditional scanners, ready to drop into your mobile applications. Additionally, the SDK offers ready-to-use, critically important UI components that significantly reduce development effort and enhance user experience, including Smart Camera integration, manual document boundaries adjustment, rotation correction, OCR results correction, and language management. The toolkit also supports text recognition in over 100 languages, processed entirely on-device.

Yes.

You can download our free demo application, which includes full SDK functionality (with watermarked outputs), documentation, and sample source code.

Free trial license without watermarking available upon request.

The Document Scanning SDK (DSSDK) from Pixelnetica™ makes it easier to add scanning to commercial mobile apps, improving speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Businesses can rapidly digitize paper documents like invoices, contracts, proof of delivery, questionnaires, etc. reducing processing time and manual errors.

Most features of the Document Scanning SDK are showcased in Pixelnetica™ SharpScan, a full-featured mobile scanner for capturing and managing multi-page documents. Please note that the source code for SharpScan is not available.

Additionally, DSSDK powers our EasyScan application, which is designed to handle one multi-page document at a time. EasyScan’s source code is readily available for Android and Apple iOS and supports modern development frameworks like .NET MAUI and Xamarin, enabling rapid integration and significantly reducing your application development time. This makes implementation quick across multiple platforms.

Get SharpScan

• Apple App Store
• Google Play store

Get EasyScan

• Apple Appstore
• Google Play store

For all supported platforms and frameworks (native Android & iOS, .NET, and Xamarin), a Document Scanning SDK (DSSDK) license is required for each application on each operating system (e.g., iOS, Android).

Bulk discounts are available for second and subsequent application licenses by request.

White-label products do not require a separate license.

DSSDK standard license is available for a royalty-free flat annual fee and includes no limitations on the number of users, installations, or scans. It can be used in any type of application—public, private, or commercial.

Support Maintenance and Upgrade Assurance (SMUA) is included with the standard license and is valid for the same duration. It offers the following benefits:

• Priority Support – via email, during business hours (Central European Time).
• Maintenance – includes free minor version updates and bug fixes (e.g. from v2.1 to v2.2).
• Upgrade Assurance – guarantees free major version upgrades (e.g. from v2.x to v3.x).

Custom licensing schemes, including irrevocable perpetual licenses, are available upon request.

Licenses for development or staging product versions are provided free of charge.

Feel free to contact us to find the optimal licensing scheme for your specific use case.

There is only one key difference between the trial and commercial licenses: the free trial license works only with a demo application ID (the package ID for Android or the bundle ID for iOS).

If a different App ID is used, watermarks will appear on the processed images.

This arrangement is typically sufficient for testing in our demo apps (provided with source code) and for initial integration into your own project.

To view results without watermarks in your own app, you can temporarily change your App ID to the demo App ID. In most cases, that’s enough for testing and demonstrations.

If you think the trial will not be enough (e.g., for demonstration to your stakeholders or clients), feel free to contact us for a temporary full license.

Once you’re ready to go live, simply replace the trial license with the commercial license issued for your own App ID.

In mobile application development, a White-label product refers to an application that shares the same functionality and purpose as the main product, but includes minor customizations such as branding, color schemes, localization, etc.

For example, it could be the same product used by a different subsidiary, region, or sub-brand within the same organization.

Such a White-label product does not require a separate license and is fully covered under the license of the main product — effectively provided free of charge.

For more details and personalized licensing advice, please contact us.

Yes, we offer competitive discounts for multiple licenses, including multiple OS and multiple applications.

For custom pricing, Contact us directly.