A machine readable passport (MRP) is a passport where the data on the identity page is encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue MRPs in the 1980s although the roll-out of the technology to smaller overseas missions was slow in many instances.
Most travel passports world-wide are MRPs. They 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 Passport Zone, which is usually at the end of a passport. It spans two lines and each line is 44 characters long. The following information is provided in the zone: name, passport number, two check digits, nationality, date of birth, sex, passport expiration date and personal identity number.
In early 2006 Pakistan become the first country in the world to issue a passport using both machine readable passports and Automated Finger Identification and Facial Recognition system Biometrics technology. Vissage was selected to implement this in the MRPs.
Between 2003 and 2005 the United States progressively introduced regulations that make machine readable passports mandatory for those entering the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program.
The advantages of machine readable passports include:
- faster processing of arriving passengers by immigration officials
- more secure, compared to the manually read passports that preceded them, since the data read by the machine would always be the same as the data in the Machine Readable Passport Zone
Types
Gallery
Covers of various machine-readable passports.See also
- Basic Access Control
- Biometric passport
- E-passport
- ISO 7810 Card standards
- ISO 14443 (Proximity card standard)
References
External links
- A description of the Machine Readable Passport Zone
- MRTD - Machine Readable Travel Document - Home (ICAO)
- ISO/IEC 7501-1:1997 Identification cards -- Machine readable travel documents -- Part 1: Machine readable passport
- ISO/IEC 7501-2:1997 Identification cards -- Machine readable travel documents -- Part 2: Machine readable visa
- ISO/IEC 7501-3:1997 Identification cards -- Machine readable travel documents -- Part 3: Machine readable official travel documents
- ICAO Standards for e-Passports:
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Last updated on Sunday June 15, 2008 at 02:09:13 PDT (GMT -0700)
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