Real-time Detection and Recognition of Machine-Readable Zones with Mobile Devices
Andreas Daniel Hartl, Clemens Arth, Dieter Schmalstieg · 2015
Abstract: Many security documents contain machine readable zones (MRZ) for automatic inspection. An MRZ is in-tended to be read by dedicated machinery, which often requires a stationary setup. Although MRZ information can also be read using camera phones, current solutions require the user to align the document, which is rather tedious. We propose a real-time algorithm for MRZ detection and recognition on off-the-shelf mobile devices. In contrast to state-of-the-art solutions, we do not impose position restrictions on the document. Our system can instantly produce robust reading results from a large range of viewpoints, making it suitable for document verification or classification. We evaluate the proposed algorithm using a large synthetic database on a set of off-the-shelf smartphones. The obtained results prove that our solution is capable of achieving good reading accuracy despite using largely unconstrained viewpoints and mobile devices. 1