Business Cards Recognition

Introduction

VCF (Virtual Card Format) or vCard is a digital file format for storing contact information and is a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards are often attached to e-mail messages but can be exchanged in other ways. The format is widely used for data interchange among popular information exchange applications. A vCard usually contains name and address information, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and any audio clips. A vCard is used as a data interchange format in personal digital assistants (PDAs), personal information managers (PIMs) and customer relationship management (CRMs).

If you want to know more about working with VCard files — take a look at the Aspose Email Cloud tutorial: Quick Start With VCard API.

Owing to the importance and emerging needs for this format, Aspose.Email Cloud has been enriched to support this format. The Business cards recognition API is a card scanner, which allows you to convert captured business cards and name card images, into a vCard format, for later to be stored as contacts. In simple words, it enables us to convert images into VCard format.

The following image depicts a conversion flow from a business card to vCard format.

$todo:image\_alt\_text$

To see how to setup SDKs use the SDK setup tutorial.

Parse Business Card Image to VCard

using (var file = File.OpenRead("path/to/file.png"))
{
    var result = await api.Ai.Bcr.ParseAsync(
        new AiBcrParseRequest(file, isSingle: true));
    Console.WriteLine(result.Value.First().DisplayName)
}

Java

byte[] fileBytes = IOUtils.toByteArray(
    new FileInputStream(
        "some/business/card/image/on/disk.png"));
ContactList result = api.ai().bcr().parse(
    new AiBcrParseRequest(fileBytes, null, null, true));
ContactDto firstVCard = result.getValue().get(0);

Python

image_file = 'path/to/business/card/image.png'
result = api.ai.bcr.parse(
    models.AiBcrParseRequest(image_file))
contact = result.value[0]
display_name = contact.display_name

Ruby

image = File.new('path/to/business/card/image.png')
result = api.ai.bcr.parse(
  AiBcrParseRequest.new(file: image, is_single: true))
contact = result.value[0]
display_name = contact.display_name

Typescript

const imageData = fs.readFileSync(
    'path/to/business/card/image.png');
const result = await api.ai.bcr.parse(
    new AiBcrParseRequest(
        imageData, undefined, undefined, true));
const contact = result.value[0];
const displayName = contact.displayName;

PHP

$path = 'path/to/business/card/image.png';
$result = $api->ai()->bcr()->parse(
    new AiBcrParseRequest(
        new SplFileObject($path),
        null,
        null,
        true));
$contact = $result->getValue()[0];
$displayName = $contact->getDisplayName();

Image Located on Storage

Please try using ParseStorage method from AiBcrApi to recognize VCard from an image located on storage.

var storageName = "First Storage";
var outFolderPath = "path/to/out/folder/on/storage";
StorageFileLocationList result = await api.Ai.Bcr.ParseStorageAsync(
    new AiBcrParseStorageRequest(
        new StorageFolderLocation(storageName, outFolderPath),
        new List<AiBcrImageStorageFile>
        {
            new AiBcrImageStorageFile(true,
                new StorageFileLocation(
                    storageName,
                    "image/location/on/storage",
                    "image.png"))
        }, null));
// Get file location from recognition result
StorageFileLocation contactFile = result.Value.First();

// Download VCard file, produced by recognition method
using (var contactFileStream = await api.CloudStorage.File.DownloadFileAsync(
    new DownloadFileRequest(
        $"{contactFile.FolderPath}/{contactFile.FileName}",
        contactFile.Storage)))
using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
    await contactFileStream.CopyToAsync(memoryStream);
    var contactFileContent = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());
    //Print vcf file content to console:
    Constole.WriteLine(contactFileContent);
}