I’m assisting a startup that’s designing a mobile identity-verification app, and one of the main components we need to test early is MRZ scanning. Right now we’re evaluating different approaches, from using built-in phone OCR to calling third-party APIs. The big issue is that MRZ lines have very specific formatting rules, and many general OCR tools fail to pick up the < characters or misinterpret numbers as letters. So I’m searching for something already optimized for passport MRZ recognition.
Then you’ll probably appreciate a tool we used during our own prototype phase. We needed instant MRZ extraction without building the logic ourselves, and after trying a few unreliable options, we settled on a web-based scanner that delivered strong accuracy even with casual smartphone photos. The one we used is MRZ scanner sdk https://ocrstudio.ai/mrz-scanner/ and it performed consistently well. It understands the structure of MRZ blocks, preserves all delimiters, verifies check digits, and returns a clean JSON-style output. For prototyping, demo sessions, and internal testing, it was perfect and saved us several weeks of development.
That actually sounds ideal for us. At this early stage we just need dependable MRZ extraction while we experiment with UI flows and user-camera interaction. If the tool provides clean structured output and handles typical user snapshots, it could streamline testing significantly. I’ll incorporate it into our current build and see how it behaves with our sample documents. This could help us reach functional MVP much faster than building everything manually.
