Check-in Nightmares? Not With ID Scanners ​

It’s hard to believe that merely 100+ years ago, very few people needed any travel documents at all. Europe and the British Empire began to control international travel when trains became faster and cheaper, and people - particularly businessmen - began to travel more. Since then, various societal upsets such as major wars, massive terrorist activities, and, most recently, COVID-19 and governments’ reactions to it have changed the landscape dramatically. We endure continually increasing documentation required for international and even domestic travel.

Check-in for travel becomes more complicated as these documents and other security procedures become more complex and sophisticated. Manually checking all the passports, identity cards, vaccine certificates, and test documentation, boarding passes can take up impossible amounts of time. If all this were done manually - and, unfortunately, that is indeed the case sometimes - it would take hours to board passengers on a plane, train, or ship.

ID scanners and other document scanners have become commonplace at check-in gates to allow authorities to process passengers in a tiny fraction of the time required by manual processing.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the mysteries of these electronic wonders, including

1. how they work,
2. how they accurately recognize individuals,
3. and how they speed up the identification process.

How Do ID Scanners Work?

When you scan a document on your home or office input/output device and save it in a file on your computer, the process is similar to the first step in a document scanner’s function: creating a digital image of the document. Sophisticated scanners, however, go several steps further in producing an image of the scanned document that is free of reflections and other imperfections. Since the lighting conditions are often not ideal where scanners operate, they use different lights and light angles to create the clearest possible image.

The next step in an ID scanner’s processing is again similar to what you do if you apply an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) app to your scanned document. OCR produces text you can edit and manipulate just as if you’d typed it yourself. The electronic scanner starts with a simple OCR to identify the visible characters on the scanned document. Then comes the tricky part of reading what cannot be decoded by just looking at it. Many ID documents have information embedded in their images. There are RFID chips, IPI (Invisible Personal Information embedded in photos), barcodes, QR codes, and other information carriers visible only to specially programmed electronic readers. A competent scanner must read and interpret all this embedded information accurately and store it so that a computer can read it and produce a visible report.

ID Scanners Authenticate Each Record

Additional software in a good scanner carefully searches for indications that a document has been forged or faked. In the past, this process alone could require teams of highly trained individual agents. However, humans are prone to errors; in fact, many faked documents are so well done that an untrained gate agent or other workers can’t detect them.

Sophisticated document scanners like Adaptive Recognition’s Osmond passport reader and ID scanner automatically apply several authentication steps to every aspect of every document. When this was done manually, periodic samples could be checked, or trained forgery experts could be called in if an agent suspected a fake. With the electronic scanner checking every security detail, a fake or forgery won’t get through undetected. As forgers

learn this, they begin to see that their craft is futile, and fewer spurious documents appear.

The use of a good document scanner can eliminate human error. There’s never a need to enter data manually anywhere, save files, interpret worn documents, or any of the other processes involved in manual document handling. Additionally, unlike manual entry, all data read by a document scanner is immediately encrypted. It’s only available to those with an authenticated need for it.

The European Entry/Exit System (EES), to be implemented in the first half of 2022, will require the biometric identification of all non-EU travelers - one more hurdle to be scaled in border check-ins. ID scanners and passport readers play a big part in this identification process to guarantee not only the security of the borders in general but to also make the traveler screening process as fast and smooth as possible. For instance, the Hungarian (EU) side of the Serbian-Hungarian border crossing point at Röszke is one of the first land border crossings to be compliant with this new requirement.

How Do ID Scanners Speed Up Data Processing?

Seeing that nowadays every minute counts, there is literally no point in not having electronic document scanners. In fact, here are a few reasons why such a device is basically a must:

• Manual document processing and writing down or entering the data in a computer takes several minutes

• Embedded data such as embossed text or UV images are invisible to an agent handling the document

• Humans are error-prone: they can be tired, bored, distracted, or irritated, which heavily influences their work in an area where inaccuracies can lead to an innocent person being unjustifiably harassed by authorities or, worse, letting a criminal pass inspection.

If you’re trying to get thousands of people through an immigration or security checkpoint or board several hundred people on an airplane in a short time, an ID scanner is a tool you can’t do without. All the possible setbacks we mentioned above can be easily nullified with an electronic document scanner:

• They reduce check-in times at boarding gates and security checkpoints by orders of magnitude

• They take human errors out of the identification process

• They identify fake and forged documents that human agents would miss

• They enable high levels of security that would be impossible with manual methods.

Adaptive Recognition, a leader in scanning technology since 2000, knows the importance of making the ID verification process fast, inconvenient, and secure by heart. As such, they strive to develop state-of-the-art devices like their latest ID scanner model, Osmond.

But Osmond is just the icing on the passport reader and ID scanner cake. You may want to visit Adaptive Recognition’s website for more information and check out their line of document scanners. Each page has a dedicated button to contact their experts and discuss your ID scanning needs.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the management of EconoTimes