Global Visas Entry

Background

Traditionally, to obtain a visa to enter the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, applicants are required to visit the closest Visa Services Center that are run and operated by employees or contractors of the Saudi Arabia MOFA.

Saudi Officials realized how difficult and exhausting it can be for applicants to travel to these Visa Services Centers. The concept for a Mobile Application to capture all required data was born. As a government owned company, the Saudi Visa and Travel solutions partnered with AA Technology to build this new Mobile Visa Application.

The applicant is designed to collect demographic data, fingerprint data and facial image. The application securely transmits the captured applicant’s data to the Saudi Arabia National Information Center (NIC) for performing fingerprint matching against 100 Million subject fingerprint database.

If the NIC fingerprint search reveals a disqualifier (a reason for not issuing a visa to the applicant, NIC will send an electronic message to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) to deny issuing a visa, otherwise, NIC will instruct MOFA to issue a visa to the Applicant.

Visa Mobile App

The Saudi Company for Visa and Travel Services (SVTS) developed a mobile application to facilitate the capture of several required data types that are required for the processing of visa applications. To that end, SVTS utilized AA Technology International as the bases for the development a biometric based mobile self-enrollment visa processing integrated application. The Mobile Application is designed to capture and manage the following data types:

Applicant’s demographic data: Applicant’s demographic data is electronically extracted through capture of the Machine-Readable Zone (MRZ) or by performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the applicant’s passport data page

Applicant’s fingerprints: The capture of applicant’s fingerprint is achieved by utilizing AA Technology International PrintScan mobile Fingerprint technology. The PrintScan application software leverages the built-in cameras on mobile smartphone phones. The AA Software captures fingerprints in a 1-4-1-4 (Right Thumb, Right four fingers joint, Left Thumb, Left four fingers joint), subsequently, the AA Technology software processes the captured fingerprints to segment the captured images into ten individual fingerprint images, process fingerprints for quality assurance, performs sequence check and packages the fingerprint record in a compressed WSQ NIST format.

Applicant’s facial image: The capture of applicant’s facial image is achieved by utilizing the mobile phone’s front camera. The facial capture is preceded by a liveness check. The captured facial image is ISO-compliant and is compared (matched) against a clipped facial image from the passport data page

Payment processing: Payment details are captured through an interface to a government payment portal

Use Case

Applicant downloads and runs Mobile Visa Application
Mobile Application prompts applicant to capture image of the Data page at in the applicant’s passport
Mobile application reads and captures applicant’s demographic data stored in the MRZ code at the bottom of the ID Page
Mobile application clips and temporarily stores the applicant’s photo the ID Page
The Mobile Application’s Facial Recognition component prompts the applicant to take selfie of him or herself
The Facial Recognition component comparers the captured selfie to the stored clipped passport photo. This steps is intended to provide a liveness check.
If the matching of the selfie to the passport clipped image positively match, the applicant is directed to the AA Technology Printscan for self fingerprint capture
Applicant is prompted to capture his or her own fingerprints (all ten fingerprints in a 1-4-1-4 mode)
After successful fingerprint capture, applicant is directed to a payment portal to pay all applicable fees.
The application prepares applicant’s data in a NIST-compliant format and securely transmit the data to the National Information Center (NIC) for matching
NIC matches applicant’s record against 100 Million subject database. If search results clears applicant, NIC electronically instruct the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue a visa to the applicant