MRZ (Machine Readable Zone) 101

MACHINE READABLE TRAVEL DOCUMENTS

A machine-readable passport (MRP) is a machine-readable travel document (MRTD) with the data on the identity page encoded in optical character recognition format. 

These travel documents are standardized by the ICAO Document 9303 and have a special machine-readable zone (MRZ), which is usually at the bottom of the identity page at the beginning of a passport and includes 2 or 3 lines with the OCR-B font text. 

This article shows and explains the five main types of Machine Readable Travel Documents, according to the ICAO Standard and therefore, covered by the Anyline MRZ scanner. 

TD3 Documents

TD3 sized Machine Readable Travel Documents consist of two lines of 44 characters each.

The full specification can be found in Doc 9303 Part 4 on the ICAO Website

TD2 Documents

TD2 sized Machine Readable Official Travel Documents consist of two lines of 36 characters each.

The full specification can be found in Doc 9303 Part 6 on the ICAO Website

TD1 Documents

TD1 sized Machine Readable Official Travel Documents consist of two lines of 30 characters each.

The full specification can be found in Doc 9303 Part 5 on the ICAO Website

MRV-A Visa

Format-A Machine Readable Visas consist of two lines of 44 characters each. 

The full specification can be found in Doc 9303 Part 7 on the ICAO Website

MRV-B Visa

Format-B Machine Readable Visas consist of two lines of 36 characters each.

The full specification can be found in Doc 9303 Part 7 on the ICAO Website

 OTHER MACHINE READABLE DOCUMENTS

MRZ on Swiss Driving License

The MRZ on Swiss driving licenses is not following the ICAO standards. It consists of three lines - one line of 9 and two lines of 30 characters each. 

The fields which can be extracted from the MRZ are listed below. (Note that the name of the field in the Anyline result can differ from the name in the explanation image below.) The following list shows the Anyline field name at first and the alternative name in brackets:
 

• Document number (raw card number),

• Document type (kind of document),

• Issuing country code (issuing state),

• Personal number (PIN number),

• Optional data (version number),

• Date of birth,

• Surname (name),

• Given names (first names)
  

For a full specification, we refer to the ASTRA brief

MRZ on US Green Card

The MRZ on US Green Cards is not following the ICAO standards. It consists of three lines of 30 characters each and has a special document type. The fields which can be extracted are listed below. Note that the name of the field in the Anyline result can differ from the name in the explanation image below. The following list shows the Anyline field name at first and the alternative name in brackets:

• Document type (C1 or C2),

• Issuing country code (USA, the issuing country),

• Document number (Alien number),

• Personal number (Immigrant case number),

• Date of birth,

• Sex,

• Date of expiry,

• Nationality,

• Surname (Name),

• Given names

All Check Digits Valid

Since some countries do not fully implement the ICAO Specifications, invalid check digits do not result in an invalid result object. Instead, the allCheckDigitsValid flag is set to false if at least one of the check digits is invalid. To determine the validity of individual check digits, the ICAO check digit algorithm can be found in Doc 9303 Part 3 on the ICAO Website.

If the character at the check digit’s position is not a digit, no valid result will be returned. Exception: If the optional Personal Number field is left empty (only containing ‘<’), an empty Check Digit for the Personal Number (‘<’) is considered valid.

Processing of MRZ data with Anyline

To extract the data from MRZ image files obtained by scanning, it must go through the following processing stages:

Step 1 - Preprocessing of scanned images 

You scan an ID document's identity page with MRZ.

Step 2 - Extracting data from MRZ

Only one MRZ may be captured and processed at a time. The text of each of the 2 or 3 MRZ lines will be recognized and parsed to extract the data fields. Anyline provides the calculation of the checksum of the extracted data according to the ICAO standard. The calculated checksum can be compared with the original checksum, to ensure and deliver an accurate result.