Scan IDs & Passports with Your Device

Passport and boarding pass checks at airports, new e-banking account verification, ID checks or age verification also checking in at a hotel etc. We can use this feature in many web applications, mobile applications and desktop applications.

There are many services for Passport and Identity document scanning. You can use BlinkID, MRZ Scanner, Tesseract, etc. Part of our Explorations involve getting to know each tool and review what is possible with each one.

After reviewing and working with several of these services, lets talk about our favorites:

Tesseract

The most general purpose OCR scanner tool out there is Tesseract.

Tesseract is an optical character recognition engine for various operating systems, its development is funded by Google, you can use it in web applications, mobile applications and desktop applications.

As Tesseract is for general purpose scenarios you need to be clear on what is the specific use case you will use this tool. OCR and text scanning can be used in many ways, license plate recognition, PDF scanning, image recognition, text scanning, etc. You have to take into account that as there are many industry variations you would need a specialized team or developer to center in your industry focus and develop a custom solution for your use case with Tesseract.

Tesseract can be combined with React Native to bring text recognition to your mobile apps.

BlinkID

BlinkID claim is “BlinkID is the safest, most powerful software trained to scan and extract data from IDs, built on our very own machine learning system.”

BlinkID features include:

• Use of Depp neural network: it recognizes many international IDs and passports.
• Fast results: it claims a 0.4 seconds recognition.
• Custom interface built-in: this accelerates the development process and make the user scanning the document has a good journey.
• Security: They don’t send the data to external servers, all is processed on the device.

MRZ Scanner

MRZ Scanner claim is “Scanning a passport, visa or IDs with a mobile device is lightning fast. More successful scans means more successful transactions.”

MRZ Scanner features include:

• Security: process codes directly on the mobile device, it stays in your closed system. No data is sent to third-party cloud servers.
• Work offline: works in real-time, locally on a device, without the need of internet connection.
• Cost reduction: works on your mobile device so there is no need to spend money on expensive external readers.

Use cases and industries

There are many use cases for Identity document and Passport recognition. These are just the most used, we are sure custom products can benefit from these technologies.

• Accommodation, Travel and Hospitality
• Easy check-in, register and verify guest information, without errors.
• BlinkID also offer credit/debit card scanning for charge and pay of the stay.
• For the Airline industry this could imply less time in desks queues.
• Easy onboarding to your product offering.
• On-premise access to your physical locations.
• Rental car services.
• Automotive industry.
• Healthcare systems.
• Telecommunication services.
• New e-Banking services.

Conclusion

Each platform has very good features. We always recommend building a Proof of Concept (PoC) to test if the capabilities of any platform adjust to your needs. Tesseract will involve more work for custom situations. BlinkID and MRZ Scanner works with specific industries and that represents a huge advantage in terms of development time and readiness for your project. We recommend using BlinkID if you need more services as license plate recognition, credit/debit card recognition, or others.

Remember, we can develop these solutions either for mobile or tablet (android and iOS) so, no need to have a custom scanner and more associated costs for your project.

If your company needs this solution please get in touch, and we can discuss the best alternative for your use case.

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