In our onboarding department we experienced the same struggle, especially when clients sent us images captured with older phone cameras. After testing several OCR engines, we finally found something designed specifically for MRZ zones instead of general text. It’s an online scanner available at MRZ passport reader https://ocrstudio.ai/mrz-scanner/ and it has been surprisingly robust. Even when the image is slightly rotated, has glare on the bottom section, or shows faint characters near the edges, it consistently pulls the correct MRZ fields and validates the check digits. It really reduced our error rate dramatically!