Hey what OCR challenges are you solving?

We’ve been working on a Passport OCR API as part of AZAPI, mainly to make passport data extraction easier for applications that still depend on manual document entry.

The problem sounds simple at first upload a passport image and extract the information. In practice, there are quite a few things to think about. Passport images can come from different cameras, have different lighting and quality, and contain both visible text and the machine-readable zone MRZ.

Our current focus is on turning that document into structured information that developers can actually use in their applications instead of returning a large block of raw OCR text.

The use cases we have in mind include KYC, identity verification, fintech onboarding, travel applications, and other document-processing workflows.

One thing we’ve found interesting while working on this is that OCR is only one part of the problem. Image quality, field mapping, validation, error handling, and how the extracted data fits into the rest of an application are equally important.

We’re continuing to improve the workflow and make the API easier to integrate for developers.

For anyone here who has worked with document OCR:

What has been the most frustrating part for you - image quality, field extraction, MRZ processing, validation, or integrating OCR into the existing application?

Would be great to hear how others are approaching it.