Face recognition instead of passports: Forget boarding passes. In the future, our faces will be the only ones we will need to board an airplane. Finland's Finnair Finnish airline and Finavia airport operator are testing the use of face recognition technology to accelerate airport check-in.
"OR face recognition is one of the new technologies we are testing at some airports. There is interest in this from the aviation world and elsewhere," Timo Rissanen, Finnair's head of ground in Helsinki, tells ZDNet. 
During the three-week test, 1.000 of Finnair's passengers are invited to be guinea pigs in the new system. With an Android app, they take three images of their face, which are turned into untraceable biometric identifiers to avoid the images being stored by third parties, and choose a designated desk 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. project manager of Futurice.
“The challenge is how to provide a comfortable experience for passengers, and not add another uncomfortable one procedure 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] ".
