ID Scanning and Reading Technolgy

ID reading has become an integral part of today’s society. Reading an ID with today’s technology has come a long way and can server many purposes as well as many industries. Some of the main reasons for extracting the data off an ID are:

• Compliance
• Age verification
• Data Capture for marketing
• Getting customer information to populate contracts and applications

Most software companies that read drivers licenses and passports use preprinted media on the documents that are specifically designed to be read by computers. If you take out your Drivers License and flip it around, you will see a spotted rectangle which is called a 2D Barcode. Not all states have this feature but many do.

Here is an example of what a 2D Barcode looks like:

A huge benefit to scanning the 2D Barcode is it’s accuracy. The downside is that in many cases the 2D Barcode does not hold all the information that is on the front of the card. Another setback is that since most barcodes are printed on the back of ID cards, scanning the barcode does not give the face image of the person in front of you handing over the ID.

Another electronic method that transfers printed media from an identification document to electronic data is the MRZ print.  MRZ is an acronym that stands for Machine Readable Zone. If you have seen passports, at the bottom of the identity page you will see letters and >>>>> symbols which are machine readable.  Another technical term in the industry is ISO 639-3 code. Below is a graphic of what it looks like:

On many border crossing ID’s and European ID’s you will also see a 3 line MRZ which is very similar to a passport MRZ line.

Although all these different types of printed media work, the ultimate solution is a technology that reads the front of an ID as you would with your eye. This ID reading technology system is based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. There are very few companies that can read an identification document this way and creating this technology is not a simple undertaking. Reading an ID using OCR is by far the best solution around today. The front of the ID not only gives you all the possible information of a patron but also include their picture. OCR Solutions, idMax software is by far the best solution on the market today. The main benefits of the software are:

• Works with any TWAIN compliant scanner (most scanners on the market today)
• Can be used on a local PC or in the Cloud (SAAS)
• Integrates into virtually any software using our SDK (Software Development Kit)
• Double the speed of other solutions on the market today
• Does not require monthly template updates the system is not based on creating a template from each state as our competitors do. It extracts data dynamically from each ID and FAST!

Contact us today for you free trial [email protected] or (802) 540-3099