New technologies for scanning IDs

For those bar and nightclub owners who are not content with reading the magnetic stripes of patrons' ID cards, a UK company has added to the ID-capturing arsenal with ClubScan. It's a all-in-one scanner, OCR driver and database management system to slice and dice customer information:

idscan

"idscan incorporates the cutting edge of Optical Card Recognition OCR technology. It uses advanced image processing and field identification capabilities to read and process the information on driver licenses, Idcards, passports and other forms of ID.

idscan application has an OCR system that is pre-trained to recognize and interpret a wide variety of font types on ID cards. Including Passports, Provisional UK, European, US, Australian, Middle East and Far East IDS & Driving Licenses.

idscan OCR technology begins reading the text information, the application uses its intelligent processing engine to correctly place the text data into appropriate text fields i.e. ID Number, Name, Address, Issue Date, Expiration Date and Date of Birth.

The combination of accurate OCR with advanced image processing yields a perfect system for scanning and filing driver licenses and ID cards and offers the only OCR system that delivers 99% accuracy. ..."

For those who want to share with other users, Sharescan adds "troublesome" former customers to a worldwide database accessible to other idscan customers. Oddly, there's no mention on the website of how this jibes with the UK Data Protection Act.

Via Engadget: The Clubscan ID scanner for nightclubs.

For a somewhat related blog entry, check out: The Canadian Privacy Law Blog: Calgary student challenges nightclub over scanning ID.