Electronic eye: optical reading technology leads Card Scanning to breakthroughs.

MORE and more nightclub bouncers will be sliding driver licenses through a scanner to detect fake IDs. More and more retailers will be scanning checks to streamline processing.

And the scanning will be done on a new breed of modestly priced devices that use visual cues instead of magnetic strips and barcodes for verification.

An industry leader in this field is Century City-based Card Scanning Solutions, a manufacturer of card reading systems that sells its technology in the United States and 30 other countries.

Card Scanning's products are designed to read information from drivers' licenses, passports, medical insurance cards and other forms of ID. Clients can use software that compares the cards against other examples of similar documents. The scanners can detect minute differences in fonts, design and other visual elements that can help flag forgeries and prevent fraud.

The scanner hardware is made in China and the software is integrated later.

The idea was born five years ago in Israel, when the company was selling magnetic scanning technology to Americans. Clients started asking for a way to get hardware and software to scan documents without the use of magnetic strips, which can't always be accessed legally.

It took two years for Card Scanning to clear the major technological hurdles using OCR--Optical Character Recognition, a relatively new and small segment of the authentication sector, compared with the far more prevalent magnetic strips and barcodes.

Iuval Hatzav, the vice president of the company, said many companies have experimented with OCR, but success with the technology takes a lot of time and effort.

Clear text

"It's an enormous amount of work and years in dedicated research and development," Hatzav said.

In standard OCR process, the scanner filters out background elements. As a result, some text can get blurred. But Card Scanning's software isolates text first, and then filters out unnecessary details without blurting any essential visuals. This results in what Hatzav said is almost 99 percent accuracy.

This system can accurately scan information from drivers' licenses from all 50 states in the country. While licenses are used for identification purposes nationwide, different states employ different techniques in designing them. That makes computer-assisted verification challenging.

For example, Georgia has an encrypted barcode on the back of a driver license and it is illegal for any non-governmental agency to obtain any information from it. That leaves OCR as the only way to scan the license.

OCR has been around for some time and companies such as Xerox Corp. use it, but in large, expensive systems. Card Scanning concentrates on the niche market of reading identification documents such as passports, ID cards and medical insurance cards.

Wilson Technologies Inc., a Wisconsin-based company that specializes in products that prevent identity fraud, employs Card Scanning's products to authenticate documents for businesses and financial institutions.

Jason Keith, chief technical officer of Wilson Technologies said Card Scanning's appeal is that their products are for small businesses.

"There is no critical application that relies or runs on this," he said. "You cannot use this to open bank vaults. For that, you use biometrics. With these, even if someone dumps water on them, it will not stop the show. Everything can be fixed."

But any shift from magnetic scanners to OCR scanners will take time, said Carlos Morales, product manager for Magtek Inc., a Carson-based company specializing in magnetic scanning products.

The cost of OCR devices has been prohibitive and companies are only now starting to come out with affordable scanners. Even so, magnetic strips and barcodes are here to stay, Morales said.

"Magnetic reading is more reliable and accurate so we cannot get away from it completely," he said. "We are still going to read and rely on magnetic strips."

Card Scanning has seen tremendous growth over the past two years. The number of employees of the company in the United States and Israel has doubled and the company's profits are growing by about 50 percent each year.

The company serves bars, stores, banks, airlines and homeland security agencies with a range of different models. The average retail price of a scanner is $649. A passport scanner is more expensive than the driver license scanner.

Hatzav sees the company's future efforts in developing a faster and portable scanner, one that adds signature capture and security-related biometric applications.

"Our plan is to expand and be the one-stop shop for all ID and security-related solutions," Hatzav said. "Other than that, we want to make the company bigger, stronger and more useful for our customers."

Card Scanner Solutions

Year founded: 1999 in Israel. Moved to Century City in 2001.

Core business: Capturing and analyzing image and data in identification documents

Employees in 2005: 12

Employees in 2006: 15

Goal: To be a one-stop shop in the ID and biometric technology industry

Driving force: The need among retailers and security services for a low-cost optical scanner