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CardNugget

On-device recognition

The camera, the reading and the identification stay on the iPhone.

ScanningAvailable since1.0.0PW-03
embedded catalog
137,835 cards
frameworks
Apple only (Vision, AVFoundation)
Trace of one scanmoderapidtotal≈ 1.2 s
0250ms500ms750ms1000ms1250ms
  • Card held steady
    133 ms
  • Rectangle detection
  • Perspective correction
  • Text recognition (OCR)
  • Match against the embedded catalog
    ≈ 400 ms
  • Leaves the phone: one request, no image
    Price request
    100–700 ms
  • Price on screen
    450 ms

What the request contains

POST /v1/prices/lookup
{
  "cardId": "tcgdex_fr_sv03.5-199"
}

If the catalog hesitates between candidates, the app falls back to text read on the card — number, set, language. Never pixels.

Typical durations in rapid mode, from the app's settings and measurements in development.

In detail

Apple's Vision framework finds the card's outline, straightens it and reads its text, all on the device. The text is then matched against a catalog of more than 137,000 cards that ships inside the app.

Because the identification happens on the phone, the network is only needed for the price. The request carries the card's catalog identifier, nothing more.

  • Outline detection, perspective correction and OCR on the iPhone
  • 137,835 cards and 1,125 set editions in the embedded catalog
  • Only a catalog identifier is sent to get the price
  • Works the same way in every printing language
Coming soon to the App StoreNumber-first identification