South Korea Driver's Licence OCR API

What Makes the Korean driver's licence Hard to Parse

The Korean driver's licence is issued by the Korean National Police Agency, with licences administered by the Road Traffic Authority. Korean licences show a licence number in the form 11-23-456789-01, the holder's name and resident registration number, and licence types such as 1종 보통 or 2종 보통. Most text is in Korean, and newer cards can also carry English information on the back.

One API Call, Named Fields

The StructOCR Driver License OCR API returns the licence number, the holder's name, date of birth, issue date, licence type and the card's renewal period. Dates are returned as YYYY-MM-DD. Send a JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF as Base64 JSON or as a multipart upload; there is no SDK to embed in your app, although official Python and Node.js SDKs are available. Step-by-step code is in the Python guide. Usage is billed per successful scan with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Where Teams Use It in South Korea

Integration & AI Prompts

Install the official SDK and pass a photo of the licence. Full request and response details are in the driver license API reference.

# pip install structocr
import os
from structocr import StructOCR

client = StructOCR(api_key=os.environ["STRUCTOCR_API_KEY"])
result = client.scan_driver_license("licence.jpg")

if result.get("success"):
    data = result["data"]
    print(data["document_number"], data["surname"], data["date_of_expiry"])

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "type": "drivers_license",
    "country_code": "KOR",
    "region": null,
    "document_number": "11-23-456789-01",
    "personal_number": null,
    "surname": "KIM",
    "given_names": "MINJI",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1995-02-11",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "date_of_issue": "2023-03-02",
    "date_of_expiry": null,
    "date_of_first_issue": null,
    "issuing_authority": null,
    "address": null,
    "vehicle_class": "2종 보통"
  }
}