OCR IQ didn’t begin as a product. It began as a frustration: why does every OCR app fall apart when lighting, fonts, or formatting deviate from textbook examples? I wanted an OCR engine that handled real-world mess (receipts, signage, notes) without requiring a lab environment.
I chose Flutter for one reason: rapid UI iteration. But OCR IQ's architecture demanded more than pretty widgets. It needed a composable, testable, and maintainable foundation. That’s where modular design came in.
Architecture Decisions I built OCR IQ using a modular Flutter architecture:
- Core functionality (OCR, translation, preprocessing) is encapsulated in isolated packages
- Presentation layer follows MVVM with
Providerfor state separation - Platform channels bridge native Android image picking and offline ML model execution
The result? Independent modules for:
- Image processing (adaptive thresholding, region-based binarization)
- OCR engine (ML Kit TextRecognizer with context switching for handwriting/printed text)
- Translation pipeline (Google Translate API with offline support)
- Post-processing (token-level correction, line reconstruction, semantic fixes)
OCR in the Wild Raw OCR accuracy meant nothing when confronted with glare, folds, or poor alignment. My custom pipeline includes:
- Adaptive thresholding per region to handle uneven lighting
- Line vector reconstruction to fix broken baselines
- Post-OCR cleanup via domain-aware spelling correction
Translation Module I designed translation as a pluggable service:
- Supports 50+ languages via a clean abstraction layer
- Caches translation pairs for offline use
- Maintains formatting via markup-preserving segmentation
Performance & Privacy OCR IQ processes images entirely on-device. My translation module supports offline packs. No images are ever uploaded. We leverage Flutter’s compute isolates to parallelize preprocessing and OCR phases.
What Users Taught Me
- Students scan whiteboards; travelers scan restaurant menus; researchers digitize microfilm
- Everyone wants accuracy, but more importantly: speed and clarity
- 'No ads, ever' isn’t just ethical, it builds long-term loyalty
Technical Highlights
- Modular architecture with Dart packages and domain-specific services
- ML Kit integration with fallback strategies for low-end devices
- Dynamic UI generated based on recognized content structure
- Dark-mode optimized with high-contrast adaptive theming
OCR IQ isn’t just another OCR tool, it’s a system built to handle the messy, unpredictable nature of real life. And it keeps getting better with every edge case thrown at me.