Release notes from blinkinput-android

v5.0.0

2021-04-02T07:20:33Z

v5.0.0

BlinkInput v5 Release Announcement

As of this version, BlinkInput SDK is fully compatible with other Microblink SDKs, which means that you can use it alongside another Microblink SDK in the same application.

Improvements:

We've translated the complete SDK to the following additional languages: Malay, Dutch, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Indonesian, Arabic, Romanian, Chinese traditional, Chinese simplified, Thai, Hebrew, Vietnamese and Filipino.
We've made the SDK safe from tapjacking, a form of attack where a user is tricked into tapping something he or she didn't intend to tap. We did this by adding a new security option that prompts the SDK to discard touches when the activity's window is obscured by another visible window. To activate it, use UISettings.setFilterTouchesWhenObscured(true).
We've introduced a new FrameRecognitionCallback callback for the RecognizerRunnerView, which is invoked each time a camera frame from a video stream is recognized. Use RecognizerRunnerView.setFrameRecognitionCallback method to set the callback.

Major API changes

To ensure compatibility with other Microblink SDKs, we have repackaged all classes. We’ve renamed the root package com.microblink to com.microblink.blinkinput, which is unique to BlinkInput SDK.
ScanResultListener interface now has an additional method called when the scanning cannot continue because of an unrecoverable error. You have to implement onUnrecoverableError method.
If you're using built-in activities, when onActivityResult is called with RESULT_CANCELED result code, the exception will be available via ActivityRunner.EXTRA_SCAN_EXCEPTION intent extra. If the user canceled the scan, the exception would be null.

Minor API changes:

We renamed EMailParser to EmailParser.
We renamed some methods:
- In LicensePlatesParser: getLicensePlateString is now called getLicensePlate.
- In RegexParser: isUsingSieve is now called shouldUseSieve, setMustStartWithWhitespace is now called setStartWithWhitespace , isMustStartWithWhitespace is now called shouldStartWithWhitespace , setMustEndWithWhitespace is now called setEndWithWhitespace , and isMustEndWithWhitespace is now called shouldEndWithWhitespace .
- In RawParser: isUsingSieve is now called shouldUseSieve.
We've renamed RecogitionMode to RecognitionDebugMode in RecognizerBundle.
We've replaced Using time-limited license! warning with Using trial license! warning. The warning message is displayed when using a trial license key.
We've deprecated DetectorRecognizer— use DocumentCaptureRecognizerinstead.
We've deprecated Pdf417Recognizer — use BarcodeRecognizer instead.

Bug fixes:

We've fixed a bug in IBAN parsing which occasionally read the reference number as part of the IBAN.
We've fixed the front-facing camera error on Oukitel WP8 Pro.

v4.3.0

2020-05-27T11:17:06Z

Breaking change:

Based on the feedback, we have restored support for x86_64 processor architecture. Due to the architecture specifics, there is no guarantee that the scanning process will work equally well as it does on the ARM architectures. The main reason for restoring support is to ease the compliance issue for developers.
We distribute SDK with ARMv7, ARM64, x86, and x86_64 native library binaries.

Improvements:

We have translated complete SDK to following languages: Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish.
We improved document detection with DocumentCaptureRecognizer.
We are now delivering the complete list of open source dependencies used in the SDK. Please check the open-source-software-used directory.

Minor API changes:

We removed RecognizerRunnerView custom attributes: mb_initialOrientation and mb_aspectMode. Use RecognizerRunnerView.setInitialOrientation and RecognizerRunnerView.setAspectMode to configure the attributes in the code.
We renamed EMailParser to EmailParser
We renamed some methods:
- LicensePlatesParser: getLicensePlateString to getLicensePlate
- RegexParser: isUsingSieve to shouldUseSieve, setMustStartWithWhitespace to setStartWithWhitespace , isMustStartWithWhitespace to shouldStartWithWhitespace , setMustEndWithWhitespace to setEndWithWhitespace , isMustEndWithWhitespace to shouldEndWithWhitespace
- RawParser: isUsingSieve to shouldUseSieve

v4.2.0

2020-03-27T08:34:03Z

Breaking changes:

We decided to remove support for x86_64 processor architecture.
x86 and x86_64 architectures are used on very few devices today; most of them are manufactured before 2015, and they take about 1% of all Android devices, according to the device catalog on Google Play Console.
We distribute SDK with ARMv7, ARM64, and x86 native library binaries. Native library x86 in SDK is kept mainly for emulator support.
We migrated the SDK to AndroidX dependencies. We replaced previous SDK dependency com.android.support:appcompat-v7 with androidx.appcompat:appcompat.

New features:

We added the option to disable Microblink logs in the console output. Use LoggingSettings.disableMicroblinkLogging(), but be careful with this option. We need full log outputs from the application for support purposes. In case of having problems with scanning certain items, undesired behavior on the specific device(s), crashes inside the SDK, or anything unmentioned, we will need a full log from your side. If you disable Microblink logs, you won't be able to provide us this information. Hence support might be limited.
We added support for capturing images of various documents (A4, or some other format):
- Use DocumentCaptureRecognizer and DocumentCaptureUISettings.
- DocumentCaptureUISettings launches activity that uses DocumentCaptureOverlayController, which is designed for taking cropped high resolution document images and guides the user through the document capturing process. The overlay can be used only with DocumentCaptureRecognizer.
It’s possible to set the theme of the provided scan activity, launched from the UISettings, by using UISettings.setActivityTheme

Improvements:

We improved VinParser:
- We added support for Renewal Identification Number (RIN) - DMV California format.
We improved camera performance on some Samsung devices.

Minor API changes:

We removed RecognizerRunnerView custom attributes: mb_initialOrientation and mb_aspectMode. Use RecognizerRunnerView.setInitialOrientation and RecognizerRunnerView.setAspectMode to configure the attributes in the code.
RecognizerRunnerFragment extends androidx.fragment.app.Fragment, instead of the deprecated android.app.Fragment.
All provided scan activities extend AppCompatActivity and they are final.
RecognizerRunner.getSingletonInstance() does not throw FeatureNotSupportedException anymore.
We added a new API for configuring camera options in UISettings. Use UISettings.setCameraSettings, which accepts an object of CameraSettings type.
FieldByFieldOverlayController is now configured by using FieldByFieldOverlaySettings instead of FieldByFieldUISettings.
Recognizer now only has one type parameter.
Recognizer.Result no longer has any type parameters.
We moved some classes to new packages.

Bugs that we fixed:

Crash when using Direct API on high resolution com.microblink.image.Image from HighResImageWrapper.
Problems with aspect ratio of camera preview on Huawei Mate 10.
Crash on some devices that use armeabi-v7a ABI. The SDK was unable to reserve address space due to memory fragmentation.
Camera busy error in camera management that was happening during the quick closing and opening of the camera.
Rare crash on Samsung J5 Prime which has been caused by race condition during the initialization of the native camera frame.
All default scan activities correctly set volume to media instead of the ring.
All default scan activities now apply a secure flag if enabled in UISettings.
Scanning bug on devices with problematic camera resolution, which caused that the SDK was unable to scan the data. Known affected devices were: OnePlus 6T, OnePlus 7 Pro, and Vivo V15.

v4.1.0

2019-05-17T10:06:37Z

New features:

enabled capturing of high resolution camera frames:
- When custom UI integration is performed, enable this functionality by using method RecognizerRunnerView.setHighResFrameCaptureEnabled and use RecognizerRunnerView.captureHighResImage to capture image
- When using provided scan activities, high resolution full camera frames taken at the moment of successful scan are returned if this option is enabled through UISettings. Concrete UISettings which implement interface HighResSuccessFrameCaptureUIOptions support this feature.

Improvements for existing features:

added option to force overlay orientation for BarcodeOverlayController (BarcodeScanActivity) - use BarcodeUISettings.setForcedOrientation(OverlayOrientation)
RecognizerRunnerView is lifecycle-aware now, it implements android.arch.lifecycle.LifecycleObserver interface
improved image return processor:
- the processor now estimates detected (dewarped) document image quality and returns the best quality dewarped image from the best quality detection
BarcodeScanActivity by default does not show result dialog after scan
updated default UI icons

Minor API changes:

Scanning timeout that can be configured by using RecognizerBundle.setNumMsBeforeTimeout is by default set to RecognizerBundle.TIMEOUT_INFINITY, which means that timeout is disabled by default. Previous default timeout value was 10 seconds.
renamded enum com.microblink.uisettings.options.ShowOcrResultMode to com.microblink.uisettings.options.OcrResultDisplayMode
for all UISettings classes which support setting of OCR result display mode, renamed method setShowOcrResultMode to setOcrResultDisplayMode

Bug fixes:

fixed crashes on Nexus 6
removed incorrect autofocus check that was performed before concrete camera type is chosen
fixed crash on some devices when using VIDEO_RESOLUTION_MAX_AVAILABLE
fixed problems in camera management:
- default camera surface is TextureVeiw for devices that use Camera1 API, otherwise SurfaceView is used
fixed camera autofocus problems on Samsung S9/S9+ when optimisation for near scanning is enabled
fixed autofocus problems in Field by field scanning on Huawei P20 pro, Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 lite
fixed bug which caused that results from the previous scan are cleared when the scan activity is run again and entities which have produced results are not used in the new scan
various other bug fixes and improvements

v4.0.0

2018-05-16T18:03:31Z

new API, which is not backward compatible. Please check README and updated demo applications for more information, but the gist of it is:
- RecognizerView has been renamed to RecognizerRunnerView and Recognizer singleton to RecognizerRunner
- SegmentScanActivity has been renamed to FieldByFieldScanActivity
- RandomScanActivity does not exist anymore
- previously internal Recognizer objects are not internal anymore - instead of having opaque RecognizerSettings and RecognizerResult objects, you now have stateful Recognizer object that contains its Result within and mutates it while performing recognition.
  - similarly we now have stateful Parser and Detector objects
  - introduced new Processor object type
  - For more information, see README, updated demo applications and this blog post
- added RecognizerRunnerFragment with support for various scanning overlays in a manner similar to iOS API. This now allows you to use built-in UI, which was previously strictly available for built-in activities, in form of fragment anywhere within your activity. Full details are given in README and in updated demo applications.
new licence format, which is not backward compatible. Full details are given in README and in updated applications, but the gist of it is:
- licence can now be provided with either file, byte array or base64-encoded bytes
introduced preview version of next generation DeepOCR. Check BlinkInputRawOcrSample to see how it can be enabled.

v3.4.0

2017-09-22T09:22:07Z

New features:

Added VinRecognizer for scanning VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) barcodes
Added unified BarcodeRecognizer for scanning various tipes of barcodes
- ZXingRecognizer and BarDecoderRecognizer are deprecated, BarcodeRecognizer should be used for all barcode types that are supported by these recognizers
added support for reading mirrored QR codes:
- affects all recognizers that perform QR code scanning
introduced GlareDetector which is by default used in all recognizers whose settings implement GlareDetectorOptions:
- when glare is detected, OCR will not be performed on the affected document position to prevent errors in the extracted data
- if the glare detector is used and obtaining of glare metadata is enabled in MetadataSettings, glare status will be reported to MetadataListener
- glare detector can be disabled by using setDetectGlare(boolean) method on the recognizer settings
added QuadDetectorWithSizeResult which inherits existing QuadDetectorResult:
- it's subclasses are DocumentDetectorResult and MRTDDetectorResult
- returns information about physical size (height) in inches of the detected location when physical size is known
added support for characters { and } in OCR_FONT_VERDANA to OCR engine

Minor API changes:

Date fields in recognition results are returned as com.microblink.results.date.Date class which represents immutable dates that are consisted of day, month and year
OcrLine.getChars() method returns CharWithVariants array. OCR char is defined by all its parameters (value, font, position, quality, etc.) and for each resulting char it is possible to have multiple variants. For example it is possible to have same char value with different font.
RegexParserSettings and RawParserSettings now work with AbstractOCREngineOptions, which is a base class of BlinkOCREngineOptions
- default engine options returned by method getOcrEngineOptions for both parser settings return instance of BlinkOCREngineOptions
BlinkOCRRecognizerSettings is now deprecated and will be removed in v4.0.0
- use DetectorRecognizerSettings to perform scanning of templated documents
- use BlinkInputRecognizerSettings for segment scan or for full-screen OCR
- until v4.0.0, BlinkOCRRecognizerSettings will behave as before, however you are encouraged to update your code not to use it anymore
DocumentClassifier interface is moved from com.microblink.recognizers.blinkocr to com.microblink.recognizers.detector package and DocumentClassifier.classifyDocument() now accepts DetectorRecognitionResult as parameter for document classification

Improvements for existing features:

improved TopUpParser:
- added option to return USSD code without prefix
improved IbanParser:
- improved extraction of IBANs without prefix and introduced setAlwaysReturnPrefix option to always return prefix (country code)
- added support for french IBANs
enabled reading of Pdf417 barcodes having width/height bar aspect ratio less than 2:1
improved date parsing:
- affects date parser and all recognizers which perform date parsing

Bug fixes:

fixed returning of images inside TemplatingAPI for frames when document was not correctly detected
Fixed bug in SegmentScanActivity:
- scan results are no longer hidden on shake event

v3.3.0

2017-05-23T13:04:17Z

optimised native binary size
- 33% size reduction for arm64-v8a ABI
- 39% size reduction for armeabi-v7a ABI
- 34% size reduction for x86 ABI
- 31% size reduction for x86_64 ABI
LibBlinkInput is now fully ProGuard-compatible, i.e. you no longer need to exclude com.microblink.** classes in your ProGuard configuration
removed support for Android 2.3 and Android 4.0 - minimum required Android version is now Android 4.1 (API level 16)
- devices with Android 4.0 and earlier take less than 2% of market share and is very costly to support them
removed isItalic and isBold getters from OcrChar class
- they always returned false, since OCR engine cannot accurately detect that
removed setLineGroupingEnabled and isLineGroupingEnabled from BlinkOCREngineOptions because disabling line grouping completely destroyed the OCR accuracy
improved TopUpParser:
- added option to enable all prefixes at the same time (generic prefix)
- added suport for 14 digits long sim numbers in addition to existing lengths (12, 19, 20)
DateParser can parse dates with month names in English (either full or abbreviated), if this option is enabled
added support for polish IBAN without PL prefix to IBANParser
prefixed custom attributes to avoid name collisions with attributes from other libraries:
- CameraViewGroup: renamed animateRotation to mb_animateRotation, animationDuration to mb_animationDuration, rotatable to mb_rotatable
- BaseCameraView: renamed initialOrientation to mb_initialOrientation, aspectMode to mb_aspectMode

v3.2.0

2017-01-31T14:04:18Z

added support for Android 7 multi-window mode
fixed autofocus bug on Huawei Honor 8
fixed black camera on Motorola Moto Z
made camera focusing more stable on some devices
- stable means less "jumpy" when searching for focused image
MobileCoupon parser renamed to TopUp parser

v3.1.0

2016-12-13T19:08:32Z

removed RecognizerView method setInitialScanningPaused. For achieving the same functionality, method pauseScanning should be used.
added support for scanning IBANs that contain spaces and dashes
added support for scanning IBAN from Georgia in Segment Scan
added support for cancelling ongoing DirectAPI recognition call

v3.0.0

2016-11-16T19:53:30Z

LibRecognizer.aar renamed to LibBlinkInput.aar
libBlinkOCR.so renamed to libBlinkInput.so
workaround for camera bug on some samsung devices
fixed camera bug on LG X Cam
fixed camera bug on OnePlus 3
fixed rare NPE in SegmentScanActivity
improved IBAN parser
improved amount parser
- amount parser settings now does not have expectAsterixOrEqualsPrefix and expectCurrencySymbol anymore - this is now handled automatically
migrated to libc++ native runtime and used clang from NDKr13b for building the native code
- this enabled c++14 features which will help us yield much better performance in the future