I figured this out by adding a guard before the CALayer adding
Before View did load
@IBOutlet weak var scanAreaImage: UIImageView!
var regionOfInterest: CGRect!
In View did load
scanAreaImage.frame is a image view that I put in via storyboard and this would represent the area I only wanted detection in,
let someRect: CGRect = scanAreaImage.frame
regionOfInterest = someRect
then in the vision text detection section.
func highlightLetters(box: VNRectangleObservation) {
let xCord = box.topLeft.x * (cameraPreviewlayer?.frame.size.width)!
let yCord = (1 - box.topLeft.y) * (cameraPreviewlayer?.frame.size.height)!
let width = (box.topRight.x - box.bottomLeft.x) * (cameraPreviewlayer?.frame.size.width)!
let height = (box.topLeft.y - box.bottomLeft.y) * (cameraPreviewlayer?.frame.size.height)!
// This is the section I Added for the rec of interest detection zone.
//////////////////////////////////////////////
let wordRect = CGRect(x: xCord, y: yCord, width: width, height: height)
guard regionOfInterest.contains(wordRect.origin) else { return } // only draw a box if the orgin of the word box is within the regionOfInterest
// regionOfInterest being the cgRect you created earlier
//////////////////////////////////////////////
let outline = CALayer()
outline.frame = CGRect(x: xCord, y: yCord, width: width, height: height)
outline.borderWidth = 1.0
if textColour == 1 {
outline.borderColor = UIColor.blue.cgColor
}else {
outline.borderColor = UIColor.clear.cgColor
}
cameraPreviewlayer?.addSublayer(outline)
this will only show outlines of the things inside the rectangle you created in storyboard. (Mine being the scanAreaImage)
I hope this helps someone.