Bangkok is famous for having the world's longest place name. Its full ceremonial name contains 168 letters, although most people know the Thai capital by its much shorter name. As it turns out, lengthy names aren't limited to places in Thailand.
At Regula, we've encountered plenty of interesting national peculiarities while building our database of more than 17,000 identity document templates. In this episode of our country-by-country series, we'll explore what makes Thai identity documents unusual and how Regula handles these features during automated processing.
💡 For more insights on other countries' IDs, head over to our articles below:
Long Thai surnames require OCR adjustments
Thai surnames can be surprisingly long. And there's an interesting historical reason for that.
The surname concept officially appeared in Thailand only in the 20th century, when Thai citizens had to choose their last names. Some Thais registered simple ones, while others preferred more elaborate family names. This was particularly common among Thai people of Chinese descent, who sometimes sought to preserve the meaning of their original Chinese surnames.
Another peculiarity is that Thai surnames must be unique to a family. Unlike Western surnames such as Smith or Jones, an existing surname generally can't be adopted by someone outside that family. This has contributed to the variety and length of Thai surnames.
Finally, it’s common for Thai people to change their names for various personal, religious, or superstitious reasons. The latter probably made Mr. San Sroi-soongnoen change his name to Mr. Makelifebetter. The current law, though, keeps excessive creativity at bay. Under the 1962 Personal Names Act, a new Thai surname must be no longer than ten letters, excluding vowel symbols and diacritics.
Thai surnames are often long and can be difficult for foreigners to pronounce.
In practice, you may encounter Thai names that range from 15 to 40 characters. This variation can create difficulties for an OCR engine, so identity verification providers must account for it.
When training Regula’s OCR to recognize Thai ID documents, we’ve added some extra space for the name and last name fields, so it can handle most of them. Of course, it’s impossible to cover every extreme case. But if we or any of our customers encounter an extremely long surname, we’ll adjust our Thai document templates and retrain the OCR engine based on the new information. This's a proven, well-established process.
Two calendars require additional date checks
Thailand uses both the Gregorian and Thai solar calendars. The year zero in the Thai Solar calendar is the year when the Buddha entered nirvana, which is 543 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar. For example, 2026 CE corresponds to 2569 BE, where BE stands for the Buddhist era, and CE for the Christian era.
On identity documents, you can find dates in both Thai and Gregorian formats on the same ID card. The two dates basically provide the same information: the date of birth, the date of issue, and the expiry date.
Dates are duplicated in the Gregorian and Thai calendars.
For automated data entry purposes alone, the OCR engine doesn’t need to convert a Thai date to a Western date, since it can simply pull the date from the appropriate field. However, recognizing dates in the Thai calendar enables an additional authenticity check.
Regula Document Reader SDK recognizes dates in the Buddhist Era, converts them to the Gregorian calendar, and checks whether the two versions match. These cross-checks can help detect counterfeit documents with inconsistent dates. The SDK also checks whether the month written in Thai is valid.
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Missing gender fields require additional data analysis
Some Thai documents, such as ID cards and driver’s licenses, don’t contain a gender field with a conventional M or F for males and females. However, this information may be required, for example, during hotel check-in.
To address this issue, Regula uses another peculiarity of Thai ID documents: they include the prefixes Mr., Miss, or Mrs. as part of a first name. For example, the ID may show Mr. Kuntapon. With lexical analysis, we can automatically infer the document owner's gender: Mr. will be defined as male, and Miss and Mrs. as female.
There might be no formal fields for indicating a gender.
How to effectively process Thai documents
Like any other country, Thai documents contain many security features and a variety of national characteristics. In this article, we highlight just a few of them, which may affect the accuracy of automated data reading. But there’s more.
A proper solution must know which algorithm is used in Thai documents to calculate the personal number, what should be written in the Nationality field down to the last character, and more. If you’re looking for a solution that covers all of the above and more, you've come to the right place.
Regula Document Reader SDK incorporates these country-specific rules to extract and cross-check data from Thai identity documents. Backed by decades of document examination experience and an extensive database of document templates, it helps organizations automate document processing without overlooking important national specifics.
Need to process Thai identity documents as part of your verification workflow? Contact Regula to discuss your requirements with our experts.
