API in Java or C++ to read MRZ Travel Document(passport) code

Question

I am looking around for an API in java or c++ to read the MRZ and decode the MRZ code in travel documents(passports).

More information on MRZ is at http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/numbers/mrp.html. Has any one done this before with an API?

Answer 1

Please see the mrz-java Google code project. It is quite new though - it only supports four MRZ formats for now.

Answer 2

Sorry I can't help directly, but one company I know of that provides this service is using OCR to extract the text and MRZ code and then presumably they have access to the algorithm for computing the MRZ.

I'm guessing though that if you're asking about an API then you may already have access to the characters and just need the algorithm to check that the text computes to ma the MRZ?

Answer 3

It's not clear if you are simply looking for a parser or you need a solution to capture the MRZ from image or images as well as parse it.

Assuming you want to capture the MRZ as well as parse it, there isn't a lot available that is free. If you want to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of the coding yourself there is freeware available but it will take some doing to get it going correctly.

Google Tesseract is available for Android, IOS, and Windows. Its a general purpose OCR engine. You can find it on:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr

If you want an SDK that is specifically designed to process MRZ, you have a few options. One such option is Xavier by SimonComputing Inc. This SDK works on Android and IOS. It provides a Widget to capture the MRZ through your smart phone's camera, then provides an OCR engine and parsing library to break down the MRZ into fields that you can use in your application.

Free demo application downloads:

On Apple Store - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xavier-mrz/id1057308745?mt=8

On Google Play – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xavier.simoncomputing.com.xavierlibrary

Free Evaluation SDKs on Github:

For IOS – https://github.com/simoncomputing/Public-Xavier-iOS-Eval-SDK

For Github - https://github.com/simoncomputing/Public-Xavier-Android-Eval-SDK