Apple iOS Document Scanner SDK Frequently Asked Questions

Pixelnetica™ Document Scanning SDK (DSSDK) for Apple iOS is a commercial library that adds document scanning to an iOS app: live camera edge detection with automatic capture, perspective correction and image enhancement, on-device OCR in 100+ languages, and export to PDF, TIFF, JPEG, and PNG (including searchable, layered PDFs).

It ships through Swift Package Manager as binary frameworks and offers both ready-to-use UI screens (camera, crop/page editor, OCR editor, language picker) and a lower-level engine API for fully custom workflows. All processing runs on the device.

Yes — Apple’s VisionKit (VNDocumentCameraViewController) is a free, built-in document camera on iOS, and OpenCV is a free open-source option. (Google’s free ML Kit Document Scanner is Android-only — there is no iOS build.)

These cover basic capture, but they leave the hard parts to you: VisionKit has no built-in OCR or searchable-PDF output, no control over the output format or the enhancement profile (black-and-white / grayscale / color), a fixed non-customizable UI, and no auto-capture tuning — you build and maintain those yourself, and you cannot patch the system component when an OS update changes its behavior.

Pixelnetica™ DSSDK is a commercial SDK that provides all of that out of the box — ready-to-use customizable screens, automatic capture with real-time guidance, perspective correction, on-device OCR with searchable PDF, and selectable compression — with support. A free trial is available.

Integration is through Swift Package Manager: add the package, import the module, and present a ready-to-use screen — a working scanner takes a few minutes. The ready-to-use UI components are customizable, and a lower-level engine API is available when you need a fully custom flow.

A complete iOS sample application and full API documentation are provided. Explore the DSSDK documentation and the sample application source code.

For assistance, contact us.

DSSDK improves scan quality with real-time capture guidance, automatic border detection and perspective correction, document-specific image processing, and flexible output and compression — turning a handheld phone photo into a clean, readable scan. In detail:

1. Intelligent Real-Time Assistance

   • Real-time guidance helps users avoid common errors such as poor framing, improper lighting, or shaky camera handling.
   • Automatic document border detection and perspective correction.
   • Automatic capture mode that activates only when images meet predefined quality standards.
   • Automatic assessment of effective document area coverage, maximizing captured image quality.

2. Specialized Image Processing

   • Purpose-built algorithms improve readability and OCR accuracy, and shrink image size for efficient storage and quick sharing.
   • Advanced distortion correction for high document quality.

3. Flexible Output and Compression Options

   • Extensive support for standard file formats including PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and more.
   • Advanced customizable PDF compression from lossless archival quality to highly optimized, space-efficient documents.

DSSDK exports PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and plain text.
It also generates layered, searchable PDFs (“sandwiched PDFs”) that embed a hidden text layer behind the page image for indexing, search, and text extraction.

Customizable compression lets you choose between highly optimized files for easy sharing and lossless files for archival — and black-and-white pages are always stored losslessly regardless of the setting.

Yes. DSSDK is available for native Android, and for the cross-platform frameworks .NET MAUI and Xamarin.

Each platform (iOS & Android) is licensed separately.

All document processing and OCR run entirely on the device — no images, page data, or recognized text are sent to any server. The SDK contains no analytics or telemetry. The only network request it can make is the optional download of OCR language packs from a location you configure, which transfers model files only, never user or document data.

DSSDK also ships an Apple privacy manifest (PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy) declaring no tracking and no data collection, so it accounts for itself in your app’s App Store privacy report and you do not need to add anything on the SDK’s behalf.

Yes. The ready-to-use screens are provided as SwiftUI views, so you present them directly from a SwiftUI app. The core engine API is Objective-C and is called from Swift through the generated interface (the SDK is imported as a Swift module). The included EasyScanner sample app is a SwiftUI app and shows both the screens and the engine API in use.

The device frameworks add roughly 16 MB before App Store thinning: the core framework is about 15 MB and the ready-to-use UI framework about 1.3 MB. Linkers dead-strip unused code and the App Store thins the download further, so the real impact on your users’ download is typically smaller.

OCR language packs are downloaded on demand at runtime, not bundled, so they do not add to your app binary.

No. The license key is validated entirely on the device — the SDK verifies it cryptographically against an embedded public key, with no activation server and no network call. This means DSSDK works in fully offline and air-gapped deployments, and your users never wait on a license check.

DSSDK targets iOS 16.3 or later on iPhone and iPad, built with Xcode 15+ (Swift tools 5.9). It ships as Swift Package Manager binary frameworks with device (arm64) and simulator (arm64 + x86_64) slices, so it builds and runs on both Apple-silicon and Intel simulators.

It is an iOS SDK — Mac Catalyst, visionOS, and macOS are not currently supported. For other platforms, see the Android, .NET MAUI, and Xamarin editions.