how can I read machine-readable passport (MRP) using android camera

Question

I want to read passports information using the android camera. please note that I'm not talking about the ePassports reading using NFC.

what I'm thinking to do is reading the text using google text recognition and after that parse the info from the text. but is there any implementation for the MRZ standards in java to parse the text?

Answer 1

If you want to read MRZ data on passport you have to recognize MRZ text data with OCR. I have made a sample app read MRZ data with Google MLKit on camera.

MLKit recognize the passport / id card MRZ data and application parse and check read mrz data is valid. If it is valid, then it sends documentNumber, expiryDate and birthDate info to biometric chip via NFC. Biometric chip responds some group of personal data of passport / id card holder.

If you are looking for a simple example of reading MRZ with MLKit on Android, here is the link: https://github.com/alimertozdemir/EPassportNFCReader

Answer 2

Parsing MRZ is easy: MRZ format for passports, id cards and visas is publicly available.

But you will definitely have a hard time doing the OCR. There are many ways of doing it, none is perfect or easy.

There are also commercial SDKs to do both.