MRZ code extraction from visa and passport documents using convolutional neural networks

Detecting and extracting information from the machine-readable zone (MRZ) on passports and visas is becoming increasingly important for verifying document authenticity. However, computer vision methods for performing similar tasks, such as optical character recognition, fail to extract the MRZ from digital images of passports with reasonable accuracy. We present a specially designed model based on convolutional neural networks that is able to successfully extract MRZ information from digital images of passports of arbitrary orientation and size. Our model achieves 100% MRZ detection rate and 99.25% character recognition macro-f1 score on a passport and visa dataset.