Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Jumio uses OCR to extract important data from an ID document, such as a driver’s license or passport. OCR was originally intended for reading black text against a white background often using a flatbed scanner — not for extracting key data fields from ID documents using small fonts and different colored backgrounds that may include holograms, watermarks and microprint. Powered by informed AI, Jumio’s OCR engine overcomes the limitations of traditional OCR and is capable of highly accurate data extraction — data that can be used to ping third-party databases or to verify a person’s age.

OCR often needs a little help from AI to properly extract key data fields such as name, address, document number and date of birth. When people take pictures of their ID documents using their smartphones or webcams, these images need to be de-skewed if the image was not aligned properly and reoriented so that the OCR technology can properly extract the data. Jumio also exploits informed AI to recognize the patterns that characterize a specific ID type, which can be challenging given the large number ID subtypes (e.g. some printed in landscape, some in portrait mode).