Passport
An official document certifying the holder's identity and entitling them to travel to and from foreign countries. It is issued to all citizens in accordance with national legislation. The passport is a booklet, in either hard or soft cover, loaded with security features. It contains personal data of the holder, information about the issuing country and authority, visas, stamps, and other marks. As a rule, each country issues several types of passports: a passport, a diplomatic passport, a service passport, an official passport, an alien’s passport, etc.
Passports differ in the ways of personalization and methods of data processing:
- passports without the MRZ and embedded microchips;
- passports with the MRZ containing mandatory and optional data formatted for machine reading using OCR methods;
- passports with an embedded electronic microprocessor chip (ePassport) which contains secured graphic and text data about the holder and the document itself.
a
b
Fig. 1. Haiti. Passport issued in 1992. No embedded microchip:
a — front cover; b — data page without the MRZ. Paper substrate
a
b
Fig. 2. Kuwait. Passport issued in 2017. Document with an embedded microchip (ePassport):
a — front cover. The biometric symbol on the passport cover (marked with an arrow); b — data page with the MRZ. Paper substrate