Browser based document scanning

Question

I am building a browser based application for document scanning. I have looked at offerings from multiple providers like dynamosoft, asprise, atalasoft etc. My basic question on browser based document scanning is that does any of these products enable scanning from remote machines, using browser based interface? Or should scanner be always connected to the system from where browser is launched?

Answer 1

Yes, There is a Application that enable scanning on remote machine. When someone open the browser a connection between web browser and that local machine application established. This connection is done easily by HTML5 Web Socket. Local application do scan and send this image via this connection to your Browser. Here is the open source repository,

ScanAppForWeb

Answer 2

Yes. Browser based document scanning relies on the communication between a local service and the web client. Usually, you need to download the installer of the local service when browsing an online demo of document scanning at the first time. If you want to scan documents from a remote machine, just deploy the service on that machine. Then change the IP for web socket connection.

For example, here is the architecture of Dynamic Web TWAIN .

The scanner should be always connected to the system from where the local service (not the web browser) is launched.

You can watch the video to see how to use Raspberry Pi as the scanner service to capture documents from iMac.

Answer 3

I'm hoping this will be helpful, though it's not a direct answer to the question.

After spending a lot of time trying to get WebUSB to work try researching other options, I found a solution that works well for my web app. Simply use scanimage to scan to the server. The client sends and AJAX request, the server builds a command string to run with shell_exec in PHP, then use file_get_contents or whatever with the scanned image. In my situation, there's no reason for the scanner to talk to the client, since the image is going to end up in a database on the server anyway.

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63198443/4509516