How to Recognize US Driver’s License on Android Mobile Apps

3 min readJun 1, 2020

According to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) specification, PDF417 symbology is used for storing personal information on US driver’s license. In this article, I will use Google mobile vision APIs to recognize a driver’s license. Besides, I will create a similar Android barcode reader app to extract information from PDF417 symbology by Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK.

Driver’s License Recognition on Android

Here is a forged driver’s license used for testing.

Google Barcode Detection

Mobile Vision APIs are capable of detecting some mainstream barcode symbologies. There is a DriverLicense class that defines common fields existing on all barcode standards.

To quickly verify Google’s API, I downloaded the sample code of Android Vision.

Create a ResultActivity.java file for displaying the information of a driver’s license:

Find the onBarcodeDetected(Barcode barcode) function in BarcodeCaptureActivity.java, and then add the following code to start the ResultActivity class when a barcode format is detected as PDF417:

Configure the activity in AndroidManifest.xml:

<activity android:name=".ResultActivity" />

Build and launch the app.

Dynamsoft Barcode Detection

Create an Android camera project using fotoapparat:

implementation 'io.fotoapparat.fotoapparat:library:2.3.1'

Get camera frames in the callback function process(Frame frame):

Decode barcodes from the frame by calling decodeBuffer() function. The image data format is NV21:

Frame frame = (Frame) msg.obj;PointResult pointResult = new PointResult();pointResult.textResults = reader.decodeBuffer(frame.getImage(), frame.getSize().width, frame.getSize().height, frame.getSize().width, EnumImagePixelFormat.IPF_NV21, "");

Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK does not provide a driver’s license class yet. We can create a custom class by referring to the AAMVA standard and Google’s Mobile Vision.

Create a class named DriverLicense:

Create a DBRDriverLicenseUtil class to define the common AAMVA fields:

public static final String CITY = "DAI";public static final String STATE = "DAJ";public static final String STREET = "DAG";public static final String ZIP = "DAK";public static final String BIRTH_DATE = "DBB";public static final String EXPIRY_DATE = "DBA";public static final String FIRST_NAME = "DAC";public static final String GENDER = "DBC";public static final String ISSUE_DATE = "DBD";public static final String ISSUING_COUNTRY = "DCG";public static final String LAST_NAME = "DCS";public static final String LICENSE_NUMBER = "DAQ";public static final String MIDDLE_NAME = "DAD";

Check whether the string recognized from PDF417 complying with the AAMVA standard:

Fetch the driver’s license information and save data to a HashMap:

Create an instance of DriverLicense class and send it to ResultActivity :

HashMap<String, String> resultMaps = DBRDriverLicenseUtil.readUSDriverLicense(result.barcodeText);Intent intent = new Intent(MainActivity.this, ResultActivity.class);DriverLicense driverLicense = new DriverLicense();driverLicense.documentType = "DL";driverLicense.firstName = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.FIRST_NAME);driverLicense.middleName = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.MIDDLE_NAME);driverLicense.lastName = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.LAST_NAME);driverLicense.gender = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.GENDER);driverLicense.addressStreet = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.STREET);driverLicense.addressCity = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.CITY);driverLicense.addressState = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.STATE);driverLicense.addressZip = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.ZIP);driverLicense.licenseNumber = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.LICENSE_NUMBER);driverLicense.issueDate = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.ISSUE_DATE);driverLicense.expiryDate = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.EXPIRY_DATE);driverLicense.birthDate = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.BIRTH_DATE);driverLicense.issuingCountry = resultMaps.get(DBRDriverLicenseUtil.ISSUING_COUNTRY);intent.putExtra("DriverLicense", driverLicense);startActivity(intent);