Full Scan Support for United Arab Emirates (UAE) ID/Residence Cards

The PixLab Document Scanner, development team is pleased to announce that is now fully support scanning Emirates (UAE) ID & Residence Cards via the /DOCSCAN API endpoint at real-time using your favorite programming language.

When invoked, the /DOCSCAN HTTP API endpoint shall Extract (crop) any detected face and transform the raw UAE ID/Residence Card content such as holder name, nationality, ID number, etc. into a JSON object ready to be consumed by your app.

Below, a typical output result of the /DOCSCAN API endpoint for an Emiratis (UAE) ID card input sample:

Input Emirates (UAE) ID Card

UAE ID card specimen

Extracted UAE ID Card Fields

UAE extracted fields

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

The same logic applies to scanning official travel documents like Visas, Passports, and ID Cards from many others countries in an unified manner, regardless of the underlying programming language used on your backend (Python, PHP, Ruby, JS, etc.) thanks to the DOCSCAN API endpoint as shown in previous blog posts:

Algorithm Details

Internally, PixLab's document scanner engine is based on PP-OCR which is a practical ultra-lightweight OCR system, mainly composed of three parts: DB text detection, detection frame correction, and CRNN text recognition. DB stands for Real-time Scene Text Detection.

PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR System - Algorithm Overview

PP-OCR Algorithm Overview

The system adopts 19 effective strategies from 8 aspects including backbone network selection and adjustment, prediction head design, data augmentation, learning rate transformation strategy, regularization parameter selection, pre-training model use, and automatic model tailoring and quantization to optimize and slim down the models of each module.

In PP-OCR, Differentiable Binarization (DB) is used as text detector which is based on a simple segmentation network. It integrates feature extraction and sequence modeling. It adopts the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to avoid the inconsistency between prediction and label.

The algorithm is further optimized in five aspect where the detection model adopts the CML (Collaborative Mutual Learning) knowledge distillation strategy and CopyPaste data expansion strategy. The recognition model adopts the LCNet lightweight backbone network, U-DML knowledge distillation strategy and enhanced CTC loss function improvement, which further improves the inference speed and prediction effect.

PixLab API 1.9.72 Released!

The PixLab development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the PixLab API 1.9.72.

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Since its launch on 2017, PixLab have already processed over 450 Millions of users contents whether static images, GIF or Videos Frames. This milestone release introduces new API endpoints, various minor bug fixes, processing speed improvements by up to 5% and many innovative features. Let's start with the one we are existed about in no particular order:

  • Passports & ID Cards Scan: While documents scanning were introduced in earlier version of the PixLab API via the /docscan endpoint. This release pushes further the accuracy of the OCR engine. A 5MB raw Passport sample now takes less than 3 seconds to execute including face detection & extraction, MRZ (Machine Readable Zone) extraction and finally transformation of the Raw MRZ data into textual content. You can try out the accuracy of the Passport scanning engine using these Python and PHP scripts to see it in action.
  • DNS infrastructure moved to Cloudflare for faster than ever response times.
  • Full support for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC).
  • Up to three layers of redundancy for the standard PixLab OCR engine for faster, accurate & guaranteed scan results.
  • A fresh update of the adult & gore content detection ML model which is used to power the famous PixLab /NSFW API endpoint that have already analyzed over 100 millions of user contents with high accuracy.
  • Face Detection (including facial landmarks extraction) & Emotion Pattern (including gender & age) extraction are now using the RetinaFace Model which scores the highest on the LFW dataset.
  • The /docscan API endpoint now fully support scanning ID cards from Malaysia & Singapore and many other countries (at users request) as well the brand new India Aadhar ID card. Find out more information about Aadhard fully support via our blog announcement here.
  • Finally, a brand new, high performance custom image processing layer written in C/C++ and powered by ImageMagick and our Embedded computer Vision Library SOD is integrated directly into our cloud API.

Pixlab customers are more than advised to take a look at The official API endpoints documentation, The Samples Page, The Github repository for additional information.

Finally, for potentially interested users, you are more than welcome to start a 7 days free trial to see the API in action. Simply head to the PixLab Dashboard and activate your free trial from there.

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