After 9/11, higher and higher requirements are raised to documents. For the fight against terrorism and the security of the USA and the countries of the European Union, the USA and the European community launched a project jointly aimed at the development of the mentioned document family meeting higher security requirements. The development is based on the ISO 7501 collection of standards and recommendations, or as it is more well-known, the ICAO 9303 document. The document has three parts which deal with the passport, visa and other travel documents.

The first part which refers to the passport includes two major topics. Considering the first topic, the document publishes the regulations for machine readable passports which has such visual control zone and machine readable zone where the important information are present in OCR-B characters. Considering the second topic, the document includes those requirements connected to biometric development with which the machine readable passport can become real e-passports. These requirements are the following:

• ISO 14443 type A,B: standards applying for RF chip
• ISO 7816-4: standard defining the instruction set for smart cards
• ISO 19794-5: instructions for face identification
• ISO 19794-4: instructions for fingerprint identification
• ISO 19794-6: instructions for iris identification
• Biometrics deployment of MRTD: introduction of biometric characteristics, definition of data formats.
• LDS description of logical data structure, in which the specified data is stored on the RF data carrier.
• PKI instructions in connection with data and communication protection.

The chapter of passports is having its 6th edition due to continuous development.

The second part includes the instructions for the two types of visa (A and B). In the third edition of the document, it was stated that the visa should include the carrier's portrait. The part about machine readable travel documents contains the description of ID-1 sized plastic cards and ID-2 sized TD-2 cards which is the ISO 7810 standard. Besides the specification of the visual control zone and the machine readable territory, this chapter of the document includes the description of the optional capacity increasing technologies.