Document verification

Checking that an ID is real and unaltered.

A service looks at a photo of the document and decides whether it is a genuine ID or a fake, and whether anyone has edited it.

Authentication of a document's security features, structure, and data consistency against issuer templates. An issuer template is a reference for what a genuine document from a given country, state, and year should look like.

A document verification check typically runs in these steps:

1. The system captures the document and checks image quality.
2. It identifies the document type and matches it to a template.
3. It inspects security features, layout, fonts, and printing.
4. It checks that the data agrees with itself, such as the printed text against the barcode or machine-readable zone.
5. It returns a pass, fail, or review result.

The checks fall into a few groups:

• Security features, such as holograms, microprint, and UV elements.
• Structure, such as layout, fonts, spacing, and field positions.
• Data consistency, such as check digits and agreement between the front, the barcode, and the chip.
• Tamper and capture signals, such as edited fields, replaced photos, and recaptured screens.

Document verification sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Government source-of-truth validation checks whether the identity behind the document exists in a government record.
• Document liveness checks that the document was captured live, not replayed from a screen or an earlier scan.
• Identity verification is the broader process that combines document checks with a selfie and other evidence.

For more, see Document Verification: Meaning & Importance.