What is a Passport ID Number?

Details from papers such as ID cards and passports are frequently manually recorded or captured in a number of organizations in order to submit copies for KYC activities. It is a laborious and time-consuming process for the reviewers to manually verify, type down, and insert information such as name and address into databases or ERP systems in order to digitize them. Therefore, optical character recognition (OCR) is used by most individuals to make this procedure more efficient. 

Consider it as a computer algorithm that can translate photographs of handwritten or typewritten text into text format, if you are unaware of this. We’ll talk about how businesses and developers may automate information extraction for KYC papers in this blog, including reading intricate fields like MRZ code. We’ll also go over the difficulties that must be overcome in order to develop an MRZ passport reader. Finally, we’ll talk about how to leverage Surepass to train these OCR models more effectively and use them as an online API for ID and passport scanning within your app. 

The MRZ area appears on passports and travel cards with 30 or 44 characters. The specific MRZ codes found on passports provide identifying information about a particular individual, such as the passport type, passport ID, country of issue, name, nationality, expiration date, and so forth. An image of a passport with an MRZ code may be found below.

Passport ID Number 

The 12-digit unique number known as the passport reference number is assigned to applicants for passports based on the information they have provided in their application. This is a system-generated number that combines alphanumeric characters.

Below is an explanation of how this passport reference number is broken down.

• The city or location from where the application is submitted is indicated by the first four digits of the passport reference number.
• The year of application is indicated by the next two numbers. 
• The application number submitted in that specific city or location is indicated by the remaining digits.

This file number, which is temporary in nature, is created as a confirmation of the application and the supporting documentation that the applicant physically submits at the time allotted for the appointment at the closest Passport Seva Kendra.

Finding out the status of the passport application is one of the primary uses of the passport reference number. If the application is made under the Regular Scheme, the passport is normally obtained two or three weeks after the application is granted. When applying for a passport through the Tatkal Scheme, the passport is often received one or three days after the application.

If the passport is unnecessarily delayed for whatever reason, the applicant can follow the application’s progress by using the passport reference number they gave when they physically submitted their passport application and any required paperwork.

The following is the URL to track the application’s status.

https://www.passportindia.govwithin

Home>> Monitor the Status of Your Application

The applicant will be contacted using their passport reference number if the application processing is delayed for any reason, such as a problem with any of the provided papers or a police verification. After that, the applicant can address any concerns that have arisen and fix them in accordance with the relevant requirements.

The applicant can also obtain information on the approximate time required between the time the passport is issued and when it is eventually received.

As a result, the passport reference number is crucial and must be preserved by the applicant until they actually receive their passport.

The applicant will be contacted using their passport reference number if the application processing is delayed for any reason, such as a problem with any of the provided papers or a police verification. After that, the applicant can address any concerns that have arisen and fix them in accordance with the relevant requirements.

The applicant can also obtain information on the approximate time required between the time the passport is issued and when it is eventually received.

As a result, the passport reference number is crucial and must be preserved by the applicant until they actually receive their passport.

A popular approach for documents is key-value pair extraction, which uses block objects to locate specific fields in form documents before storing the results in a map. Consider the Driving ID, for instance. Certain fields in this instance have labels such as DOB, ISS, Street Address, Sex, Eyes, etc. Finding these labels (Keys) and the values that go along with them is the current objective of key-value pair extraction. Additionally, we must ensure that this method works with other templates; that is, the same approach ought to work with papers in other formats. 

How to Scan a Passport with Surepass API?

No matter the language or template, Surepass enables you to extract data from a variety of IDs and passports. The following fields may be easily identified by our OCR API in any desired format, such as CSV, Excel, or JSON.

• Make a Free Surepass Account: Go to the dashboard and search for Driver License or Passport Models after creating a free Surepass account.
• Place your images here: After selecting a model, you may upload your passports or ID cards to your dashboard. Within a few seconds, state-of-the-art deep learning techniques on Surepass will be used to build bounding boxes of the significant key-value pairs.
• Check your Images: In the event that an image does not appear to be what you expected, you may also check it. Don’t worry, though; our models are trained using verified photos.
• Integrate your Model: Lastly, Surepass may be used as an SDK on mobile devices or incorporated into your programme. The integrate tag is where you may locate the APIs. The retrieved data can also be exported in the format of your choice.