Do all countries use MRZ on their ID documents?

No. MRZ adoption is close to universal for passports, since ICAO's 2015 deadline pushed nearly every country to phase out non-machine-readable passports entirely.

But national ID cards are a different story, because ID cards fall outside ICAO's core mandate over travel documents, and each country ultimately decides its own ID card format.

Many countries have voluntarily adopted MRZ-style formatting for ID cards anyway, largely because it's a well-tested, interoperable standard and because it lets the same scanning infrastructure used for passports also handle domestic ID cards. Most EU member states, for instance, issue ID cards with a TD1-format MRZ on the back.

But plenty of countries issue ID cards without any MRZ at all, relying instead on other machine-readable elements like barcodes or QR codes, or in some cases no machine-readable element whatsoever, just a printed card meant to be read visually.

Driver's licenses vary even more. In North America, driver's licenses typically follow the AAMVA barcode standard rather than an ICAO-format MRZ, encoding similar data (name, date of birth, license number, expiry) in a PDF417 barcode instead.

Some other countries do put MRZ-style zones on driver's licenses, but it isn't a global norm the way it is for passports.

This patchwork is exactly why a document scanning solution built only around MRZ reading runs into trouble quickly. It works beautifully for passports and MRZ-equipped ID cards, but leaves a business without extraction capability for driver's licenses, many national ID cards, and any other document type that doesn't include the zone.

A workable identity verification stack generally needs OCR of the visual zone, barcode reading, and MRZ extraction all working together, since which of those three actually applies depends entirely on the specific document in front of the camera.

ScanDoc's approach reflects this reality. Rather than treating MRZ as the only extraction method, it combines MRZ reading, where present, with visual zone OCR and barcode decoding, and automatically detects which combination of these a given document supports.

That way, a business scanning IDs from customers across many countries doesn't need to build separate logic for MRZ-equipped documents versus everything else. The software figures out what data sources are available on each document and extracts what it can.