Russians’ foreign passports may be deemed invalid and may not be taken abroad if they contain errors, including the spelling of numbers 1 and 7. CEO of Smart Engines (developer of document recognition and verification systems), Doctor of Technical Sciences, told socialbites.ca about this Science Vladimir Arlazarov.
The head of the development company warned that special attention should be paid to the machine-readable zone (MCZ) – these are two lines with alphanumeric code at the bottom on a white background.
“In MChZ you have to pay close attention to the font. A special OCR-B font of size 1 is used when filling this field. “The font incorrectly used in international passports differs from the correct spelling by only two numbers, 1 and 7.”
Arlazarov explained that if the number 1 is written with a line, that is, a comb, and the number 7 does not have a smooth curve, the spelling will be considered incorrect.
The expert also explained that obtaining a biometric passport (with a validity of 10 years) would be a good protection against such problems. Arlazarov explained that this document guarantees greater security against errors due to the need to save all data on the chip.
According to him, international passport holders need to double-check all data upon receipt and make sure that experts did not make mistakes when preparing the document.
“The verification algorithm itself is simple and will not take more than 10 minutes. You need to carefully check all lines, including those that are not clear (for example, place of birth). For example, if the city is written incorrectly, the passport will automatically be considered invalid. Or the same if the letter “J” is printed instead of the letter “I”,” he concluded.
It turned out that there were Russians before. started to open At the border due to errors in passports.