Picture several dust-covered boxes filled with old documents. The kind you can find stacked in a police station’s storage room. These documents might have clues to unsolved crimes, but digging through them can be a difficult task. However, optical character recognition (OCR) is changing how these cold cases are being solved by transforming these physical documents into scanned documents that are searchable and analyzable.
Among several OCR technologies, Machine-readable zone (MRZ) is making a huge impact, especially in cases that involve identification and travel records. Let’s find out below how MRZ OCR is helping crack cold cases.
What Is MRZ OCR?
MRZ is a standardized area found in visas, passports, and other documents. It is the section with lines of text that look like what is written in secret codes. However, it’s made to be read by machines, and that’s where an MRZ OCR comes into play. Specialized OCR extracts data from MRZ sections within seconds, making it important for tasks that involve a large number of identity and travel records.
Challenges with cold cases
Cold cases are quite known to be difficult to solve once they usually rely on incomplete or outdated information. Evidence degrades, witnesses’ memories fade, and important connections are buried under a mountain of paperwork. Sifting through these old files, border records, and old files can be tedious, but by digitizing and analyzing MRZ data from historical travel documents, you can uncover patterns, track movements, and identify connections that were previously hidden.
Benefits of MRZ OCR in investigations
Why is MRZ OCR a game-changer for solving cold cases? Let’s explore some of its benefits.
- Accuracy: Unlike traditional OCR, which struggles with poor-quality scans or inconsistent fonts, MRZ OCR is made to handle the specific format of MRZ data. This ensures high accuracy even with older documents.
- Speed and efficiency: MRZ OCR can process thousands of documents in a short time, unlike how long it will take a woman. This means that an investigator can focus on analysis instead of manual data entry.
- Pattern recognition: Using MRZ OCR to analyze large datasets can reveal patterns and connections that might be unnoticed by the naked eye. This is very important for tracking suspects or uncovering links between seemingly unrelated cases.
Ethical considerations
Since MRZ OCR relies on the quality of source material, poorly preserved documents can pose challenges. The use of MRZ OCR in investigations sometimes raises ethical questions about data security and privacy. Therefore, there is a need for law enforcement agencies to balance the need to solve crimes with respect for the rights of people.
Endnote
MRZ OCR was initially designed for routine tasks such as passport scanning at airports. But it’s fascinating to see how this has changed and can now help in solving some of the most challenging mysteries. MRZ OCR makes old documents accessible and actionable, therefore giving cold cases a second chance at being solved.
