ID OCR API that reads national ID cards from any country

No dedicated hardware is needed. Users can take a photo of their ID card with a smartphone or upload an existing image or PDF, and Mindee extracts the data in seconds. That makes it suitable for remote onboarding, mobile apps and web forms, where a physical scanner isn’t an option. If your team already uses flatbed or desk scanners, those scans work too. The same API handles every capture method, and each extracted field comes with a confidence score so you can ask users to retake blurry or cropped photos.

Most ID cards spread information across both sides. Personal details and the photo are usually on the front, and the address, issuing authority or MRZ are on the back. You can send both sides to Mindee and get all the fields back in one structured result. When the card has an MRZ (usually three lines of 30 characters on the back of ICAO-compliant ID cards), Mindee reads it alongside the printed fields so you can cross-check them. This reduces manual entry and the errors that come from reading small print or hard-to-copy ID numbers.

Mindee extracts data from national identity cards issued by many countries, regardless of design, language or alphabet, with no templates to configure. It returns standardized fields such as given names, surname, date of birth, document number, nationality, issue and expiry dates, and address when present. Because the output structure is the same for every country, you can build a single onboarding flow for international users instead of maintaining one integration per document format.

Mindee handles the data capture step of KYC. It turns an ID card image into structured data that pre-fills your onboarding form and feeds your verification checks, which speeds up sign-up and reduces drop-off. Identity verification itself (document authenticity, liveness, sanctions screening) is typically handled by a dedicated provider, and Mindee’s output can be passed directly to it. Since ID cards contain personal data, you can keep only the fields you need and avoid storing full document images, in line with GDPR data minimization. Mindee is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant.

Yes, your data is highly secured and protected during the entire conversion process. As an enterprise-grade OCR solution, Mindee takes data privacy very seriously. Here are the key security measures in place:

• Certified compliance: Mindee's infrastructure is SOC 2 Type II certified and fully GDPR compliant, ensuring strict industry standards for data protection.
• Encryption: All documents and extracted data are fully encrypted both in transit (during the API call) and at rest.
• Data localization: You have control over where your data is processed, with the option to host and process your data on either EU or US servers.
• Strict privacy: Mindee respects data confidentiality. Your processed documents are not shared with third parties, and your private data is not used to train global AI models.

In short, your sensitive documents are processed in a secure, isolated environment and remain completely under your control.

We provide a 14 days free trial so you can fully test any of our OCR models — no credit card required. After this, we offer different pricing tiers depending of the volume of pages processed and the features you might need. See the pricing page for more information.

The supported document formats are:

• PDF (application/pdf) – While technically a document format rather than an image, it is natively supported for all extraction models.
• JPEG / JPG (image/jpeg)
• PNG (image/png) – Must be non-animated.
• WebP (image/webp)
• TIFF / TIF (image/tiff) – Both single-page and multi-page TIFFs are supported and processed similarly to PDFs.
• HEIC (image/heic) – Apple's High-Efficiency Image Container format.

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📌 Important technical limitations to keep in mind:

To ensure the OCR pipeline runs smoothly and successfully returns your JSON, make sure your files adhere to the following constraints:

• Maximum file size: 100 MB per file.
• Maximum page count: Up to 200 pages per document.
• File state: The files cannot be encrypted, and PDFs must not be password-protected.