  Identity documents automatic reading and verification is an appealing
technology for nowadays service industry, since this task is still mostly
performed manually, leading to waste of economic and time resources. In this
paper the prototype of a novel automatic reading system of identity documents
is presented. The system has been thought to extract data of the main Italian
identity documents from photographs of acceptable quality, like those usually
required to online subscribers of various services. The document is first
localized inside the photo, and then classified; finally, text recognition is
executed. A synthetic dataset has been used, both for neural networks training,
and for performance evaluation of the system. The synthetic dataset avoided
privacy issues linked to the use of real photos of real documents, which will
be used, instead, for future developments of the system.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning