Identity Reader – AI Builder
By Joe Gill
Published On 29th March 2021
On Friday Microsoft announced the addition of the ID Reader model to AI Builder. I thought I might give it a quick go and I must admit I was pretty impressed. It is incredible some of the AI capabilities in the Power Platform that you can leverage without any coding skills. This prebuilt model allows you to extract identity information from passports and also US driving licenses.
To test it I created a Power Automate Flow that triggered when a file was added to a SharePoint folder. I then selected the AI Builder action “Process and save information from identity documents”
I then selected the file content to pass as the identity document.
Using this Flow I did some tests with a number of Irish and UK passports and it worked well for all of those in a variety of formats including JPG, PNG and PDFs. It extracted the following information first name, last name, document number, county, date of birth, expiration date, nationality, and gender. It also returns a confidence score for each item of data it extracts from the image. I never noticed a deviance between the item scores for the items in a document. They all had the same score. In a real-world scenario, you are likely to add some logic to check the confidence values are populated and are over an acceptable tolerance.
I also tried the ID Reader model with my Irish driving license. My driving license was not recognized, the action did not fail and no data was extracted from it. I could see from the output that it did extract the text from my driving licence. From what I understand ID Reader only supports UD driving licenses at the moment.
One point to note is that the passport photo was not extracted by the ID Reader. The ID Reader model is currently in preview so maybe this will be added at a later stage. As I said in the intro I am impressed with the addition of the ID Reader Model to AI Builder. Yes, you could create train your own model to extract identity information from passports but it is a better proposition to utilize the one provided with the Power Platform. While my tests were not exhaustive as I only had a limited number of IDs I would be interested to see how other people got on with it.
You may also be interested in a post I did on how to use the Form Processing capabilities of AI Builder to extract the details from invoice PDFs.
