What information is encoded in an American passport's numeric code along the bottom of the front information page?

At the bottom of the photo page of an American passport is a bunch of alphanumeric information interspersed with right facing angle brackets (>). What information does this code contain?

Best Answer

From https://www.sinosecu.com.cn/en/news/view/20.html (mirror):

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is responsible for setting up standards for Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD). MRTD makes it easy for automated travel documents checking. It’s much faster and less tends to make mistakes than manual input.

MRTD have a Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) at the bottom. These MRZes are printed in the monospace font OCR-B. Passport is included in MRTD. It has two lines and each line has 44 characters. The following picture shows the pattern of a passport:

More information:

As DetlevCM mentions in their comment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_passport is worth checking out too.
ICAO Doc 9303 (mirror), which specifies Machine Readable Travel Documents.

Code:

https://github.com/konstantint/PassportEye: "PassportEye: Python tools for image processing of identification documents."
https://github.com/evermeer/PassportScanner: "With PassportScanner: use your camera to scan the MRZ code of a passport on iOS."
https://github.com/DoubangoTelecom/ultimateMRZ-SDK: "This is state-of-the-art Machine Readable Zone / Travel Documents (MRZ / MRTD) dectector and recognizer using deep learning. The Github repository contains the SDK binaries for Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi and Windows."

Pictures about "What information is encoded in an American passport's numeric code along the bottom of the front information page?"

What information is encoded in an American passport's numeric code along the bottom of the front information page? - Person Using Macbook Air

What information is encoded in an American passport's numeric code along the bottom of the front information page? - Closeup of crop unrecognizable blind person touching page with braille text while reading special book

What information is encoded in an American passport's numeric code along the bottom of the front information page? - Crop anonymous person with vision loss writing braille letter with slate and stylus

What is the code at the bottom of a passport?

MRZ or Machine Readable Zone is a particular area in an identity document (passport specifically) that encloses the document holder's personal data. Nowadays, almost every country's official identity or travel documents have MRZ, containing confidential information encoded.

What is written inside the American passport?

Below that are lines for the holder's last name, first and middle name, nationality, date of birth, place of birth, the date the passport was issued, the date it expires, the holder's gender, and the authority that issued the passport \u2013 the United States of America.

How do you read a MRZ code?

With ID cards, the first character in the MRZ indicates the type of document \u2013 I for ID card, P for passport, V for visa. Next is the country code and the three characters that indicate the country that issued the document. The country code is in accordance with International Organization for Standardization standards.

Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Images: Mati Mango, Mati Mango, Eren Li, Eren Li