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Machine readable travel document utilizing optical character recognition

A machine readable passport (MRP) is a machine readable travel document (MRTD) with the data on the identity page encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue machine readable travel documents in the 1980s. Most travel passports worldwide are MRPs. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requires all ICAO member states to only issue MRPs as of April 1, 2010, and all non MRP passports must expire by November 24, 2015. Machine readable passports are standardized by the ICAO Document 9303 (endorsed by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission as ISO/IEC 7501 1) and have a special machine readable zone (MRZ), which is usually at the bottom of the identity page at the beginning of a passport. The ICAO 9303 describes three types of documents corresponding to the ISO/IEC 7810 sizes:
"Type 3" is typical of passport booklets. The MRZ consists of 2 lines × 44 characters. "Type 2" is relatively rare with 2 lines × 36 characters. "Type 1" is of a credit card size with 3 lines × 30 characters. The fixed format allows specification of document type, name, document number, nationality, date of birth, sex, and document expiration date. All these fields are required on a passport. There is room for optional, often country dependent, supplementary information. There are also two sizes of machine readable visas similarly defined. Computers with a camera and suitable software can directly read the information on machine readable passports. This enables faster processing of arriving passengers by immigration officials, and greater accuracy than manually read passports, as well as faster data entry, more data to be read and better data matching against immigration databases and watchlists. Apart from optically readable information, many passports contain an RFID chip which enables computers to read a higher amount of information, for example a photo of the bearer. These passports are called biometric passports and are also described by ICAO 9303.

The ICAO document 9303 part 3 describes specifications common to all Machine Readable Travel Documents. The dimensions of the effective reading zone (ERZ) is standardized at in height with a margin of 3 mm at the document edges and 3.2 mm at the edge against the visual readable part. This is in order to allow use of a single machine reader.

The check digit calculation is as follows: each position is assigned a value; for the digits 0 to 9 this is the value of the digits, for the letters A to Z this is 10 to 35, for the filler this is 0. The value of each position is then multiplied by its weight; the weight of the first position is 7, of the second it is 3, and of the third it is 1, and after that the weights repeat 7, 3, 1, and so on. All values are added together and the remainder of the final value divided by 10 is the check digit.

For airline tickets, visas and more, the advice is to only use the first name written in the passport. This is a problem for people who use their second name (as defined by the order in the passport) as their main name in daily speech. It is common, for example in Scandinavia, that the second or even third name is the one defined for daily usage: for example, the actor Hugh Laurie, whose full name is James Hugh Calum Laurie. Swedish travel agents usually book people using the first and daily name if the first one is not their main name, despite advice to use only the first name. If this is too long, the spelling in the MRZ could be used. For people using a variant of their first name in daily speech, for example the former US president Bill Clinton whose full name is William Jefferson Clinton, the advice is to spell their name as in the passport. In Scandinavian legislation, a middle name is a name placed between the given name and surname, and is usually a family name. Such names are written as an extra surname in passports. People have been stranded at airports since they entered this extra family name in the "middle name" field in airline booking forms, which in English speaking tradition is a given name. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hungarian names might pose a challenge too, since the family name is normally written first. Tickets should use given name and surname as indicated in passports. This name issue is also an issue for post Brexit EU women under the Brexit settled status (they have two family names, a birth and marriage name, but only the birth name was used by the passport MRZ and therefore used in the settlement application, although they have been using the married name in UK population register).