Regular OCR
Regular OCR just isn’t built for those structured MRZ lines, so it ends up guessing too much and creating extra work. When I switched to using a proper MRZ scanner, things improved pretty quickly. I tried a few options and compared how they deal with tough cases like glare, shadows, or partially visible text. I ended up sticking with something I found here: https://ocrstudio.ai/mrz-scanner/ and it didn’t feel like some overhyped tool, more like something practical that handles real-world messiness. What I noticed is that it seems to recognize the structure of the MRZ instead of just reading characters randomly, which cuts down on errors a lot. One tip from my side is to always test with your worst images, not the clean ones, because that’s where tools usually fail. Also, check how fast it processes multiple files, since that becomes important really fast when volume grows. For me, it’s not about getting perfect results every time, but about reducing how much manual correction is needed, and this approach definitely helped.