Regula analysis finds ID document verification hardest for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese

While the Latin alphabet is the alpha and omega for around 40 percent of the world’s people, that still leaves many billions of humans who rely on a different writing system.

Automated reading of identity documents is crucial for international businesses and agencies and certain scripts can make this tricky. Regula has conducted analysis on various writing systems and concluded that keeping identity data consistent across formats, languages and systems is the main challenge.

Regula finds that global businesses increasingly struggle to read ID documents written in complex non‑Latin scripts for identity verification. From the company’s analysis Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and South Asian scripts are among the most prone to lead to errors. The issues range from lost diacritics and unclear field boundaries, to multiple writing systems on a single document and long, multi‑part names.

These inconsistencies can compound as systems reconcile native‑script text and Latin transliterations along with MRZ data, chip information and user‑submitted input. Even when each element is technically correct, small differences in spelling or structure can trigger mismatches that lead to false rejections, fraud exposure or manual reviews.

Written languages display differences from certain expectations. For example, Arabic script runs right to left. Written Chinese has traditional script (used by Hong Kong and Taiwan) and simplified script. Japanese is a combination of several writing systems that make it among the most complex written languages. Korean has an official romanization system but is not always followed, which can lead to matching problems.

With the convenience and compliance our modern times expect, these languages cause “the biggest headaches” for KYC teams, Regula’s blog post says. The company argues that the core challenge is achieving consistent interpretation of the same identity across data sources, which requires more than OCR alone. Modern verification therefore depends on layered capabilities.

Regula’s solution integrates these layered functions with a database of more than 16,000 document templates from 254 countries and territories, the company claims, which aim to reduce mismatches and limit manual intervention. Regula has a blog post examining the issues with particular focus on Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and mentioning several others, here.

Article Topics

digital identity  |  ID card  |  identity document  |  identity verification  |  OCR  |  Regula