Face recognition at airports and termination of passports

iGuRu.gr > Face recognition at airports and termination of passports

Facial recognition instead of passports: Forget boarding passes. In the future, our faces will be all we need to board a plane. Finland's national airline Finnair and airport operator Finavia are testing the use of facial recognition technology to speed up airport check-in.

"Face recognition is one of the new technologies we are testing at some airports. "There is interest in this from the aviation world and beyond," said Timo Rissanen, head of Finnair's ground division in Helsinki, at ZDNet.

See more articles from iGuRu.gr when you search for news on Google.

iGuRu.gr preferred source

During the three-week test, 1.000 by Finnair passengers are invited to make the animals in the new system. With an Android app, they get three facets of their face, which are converted into undetectable biometric identifiers to avoid storing images from third parties and choosing a designated office at the airport.

A roof camera recognizes them to the crowd and all relevant details appear on the customer service agent screen when the passenger approaches the office. The agent checks his documents and confirms that the face recognition was successful.

The test is carried out by the Finnish software company Futurice, using widely available materials, such as a touchscreen PC and a camera, as well as cloud-based software. Futurice does not name the developer of the face recognition algorithm.

Let's say that this technology will not require an airport visitor to scan its face on a device, but scanning will be automatically done by the airport cameras. So the current tests are done directly at the airport, where the environment is more demanding with lighting changes and passengers are on the move.

"We could do face recognition by taking pictures at the airport, asking passengers to go to a security checkpoint and look at a camera," explains Tuğberk Duman, Futurice project manager.

"The challenge is how to offer a comfortable experience for passengers, and not add another awkward process before you get on the plane."

"In practice, we are talking about years of development work. I would say that in about five years it would be possible [to travel without a boarding pass] ".