The PixLab OCR team is pleased to introduce the /docscan API endpoint which let you in a single call scan government issued documents such as Passports, Visas or ID Cards from various countries.

Besides its accurate text scanning capabilities, the /docscan API endpoint shall automatically extract any detected face and transform binary data such as Passport Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) into stream of text payload (i.e. full name, issuing country, document number, date of expiry, etc.) ready to be consumed by your app in the JSON format.

Below, a typical output result of the /docscan endpoint for a passport input image:

The code samples used to achieve such result are available to consult via the following Github links:

• Python code for scanning Passports: passport_scan.py.
• PHP code for scanning Passports: passport_scan.php.

Face extraction is automatically performed using the /facedetect API endpoint. For a general purpose Optical Character Recognition engine, you should rely on the /OCR endpoint instead. If you are dealing with PDF documents, you can convert them at first to raw images via the /pdftoimg endpoint.

Below, a typical Python code snippet for scanning passports:

import requests
import json

# Given a government issued passport document, extract the user face and parse all MRZ fields.
#
# PixLab recommend that you connect your AWS S3 bucket via your dashboard at https://pixlab.io/dashboard
# so that any cropped face or MRZ crop is stored automatically on your S3 bucket rather than the PixLab one.
# This feature should give you full control over your analyzed media files.
#
# https://pixlab.io/#/cmd?id=docscan for additional information.

req = requests.get('https://api.pixlab.io/docscan',params={
    'img':'https://i.stack.imgur.com/oJY2K.png', # Passport sample
    'type':'passport', # Type of document we are a going to scan
    'key':'Pixlab_key'
})
reply = req.json()
if reply['status'] != 200:
    print (reply['error'])
else:
    print ("User Cropped Face: " + reply['face_url'])
    print ("MRZ Cropped Image: " + reply['mrz_img_url'])
    print ("Raw MRZ Text: " + reply['mrz_raw_text'])
    print ("MRZ Fields: ")
    # Display all parsed MRZ fields
    print ("\tIssuing Country: " + reply['fields']['issuingCountry'])
    print ("\tFull Name: "       + reply['fields']['fullName'])
    print ("\tDocument Number: " + reply['fields']['documentNumber'])
    print ("\tCheck Digit: "   + reply['fields']['checkDigit'])
    print ("\tNationality: "   + reply['fields']['nationality'])
    print ("\tDate Of Birth: " + reply['fields']['dateOfBirth'])
    print ("\tSex: "           + reply['fields']['sex'])
    print ("\tDate Of Expiry: "    + reply['fields']['dateOfExpiry'])
    print ("\tPersonal Number: "   + reply['fields']['personalNumber'])
    print ("\tFinal Check Digit: " + reply['fields']['finalcheckDigit'])

Finally, the official endpoint documentation is available to consult at pixlab.io/cmd?id=docscan and a set of working samples in various programming language are available at the PixLab samples pages.