TRENDING

Airport BioMetrics

How New custom

technology is going to
make security queues a
thing of past?

Presented By:
Neha Wadhawan
Nitin Shokeen
Tushar Arora
It may be hard for visa holders to board an international flight
without submitting to a facial geometry scan. Customs and Border
Protection began testing facial recognition systems
at Dulles Airport in 2015, then expanded the tests
to New Yorks JFK Airport last year.

Face-reading check-in kiosks

will be appearing at Ottawa International Airport this spring, and
British Airways is rolling out a similar system
at Londons Heathrow Airport, comparing faces captured at security
screenings with a separate capture at the boarding gate.
Why it is needed?
3.8 billion passengers took to the skies worldwide last year. That figures
expected to double in the next 20 years, but airport capacity cant begin to grow
at that pace.
Raising terrorism alerts have recently led to the global tightening of airport
security. Several security measures are being deployed in airports to meet the
terror challenges.
Weve already adopted biometrics in our personal and business lives with
fingerprints (logging in to our phones), voice (Siri, Cortana) and facial recognition
(logging in to Windows 10 with our faces). So why not at airports?
Now that the science is maturing, airports are rushing to join the dots between
check-in, bag drop, immigration and border control, airside security and the
boarding gate using e-Passports (every UK passport now has a chip embedded
in it).
 How soon will we have a biometric airport?
Were pretty much there in terms of
readiness, Stephen Challis, Sitas head of
product development.

We have a trial thats been running for six

months in Brisbane, where the passenger
enrols their passport, boarding card and their
face image at check-in, then uses that
through the various control points.
The bigger picture!
A Selfie before you fly!
One of these upcoming features is the
Single Token Travel enrolment process
which you do before check-in using
smartphones. Using Sitas app, you scan your
passport and take a selfie which matches
your face to the e-Passport data. Once
matched, you can proceed to security if
youve already checked in online.

Its a proof-of-concept at the moment, but

professionals are still looking to demo that in
a live operation by the end of this year.
 At check-in
Face recognition technology could
offer possibilities for smoothing the
departure process from the
customers point of view.

Facial recognition is part of the

larger megatrend of biometric
recognition, and it will enable
hands-in-the-pockets travelling,
where you no longer need any travel
documents.
 Biometric bag drop
The advantage of using biometrics at bag drop
is two-fold: as well as saving time for
passengers, theres a visual record of the actual
passenger dropping the bag not just someone
who might have picked up the suitcase owners
boarding card.

Delta Air Lines has hopped on the biometric

bandwagon, opening the first biometric self-
service bag drop in the US last week at
Minneapolis-St Paul airport with the promise
that it will process twice as many customers
per hour as a manned desk.
Air NZ keeping a close eye on electronic
bag tag developments following
biometric bag drop implementation
At the boarding gate
Trial of face-reading technology to speed up the boarding gate process at
Boston Logan International Airport whereby, at a custom-designed self-
service camera station, passengers scan their travel documents a selfie
kiosk.

To enrol in the process, passengers scan their passports, boarding passes

and have a photo of their face taken by a special registration kiosk
(personal data is automatically deleted after boarding).

Beyond that procedure, passengers neednt exhibit any further

documentation their face is enough to grant them access through to
gate barrier and they can proceed to the plane.
 Will passengers warm to
biometric tech?
In its Passenger IT Trends survey
released this week, results say that
57 per cent of passengers say
theyd prefer biometrics to
passports and boarding passes;
those whove already used this
technology express an average 8.4
out of 10 in terms of customer
satisfaction, and feel over four
times more satisfied going through
security than doing it in the
normal way.
News Feed:
(India)
New Delhi, Sept 18: After hand-baggage stamping, boarding passes may
soon become a thing of past with aviation security agencies mulling a
biometrics check-in system on Indian airports. A total of 17 airports have so
far done away with hand baggage stamping. Ten more airports will soon do
away with stamping of domestic passengers hand baggage tags, a new air
travel regime that began at civil airports in April this year.
The CISF has said that it is exploring the option of express check-in aided
by biometrics for smooth and hassle-free air travel for passengers.
Example of Hyderabad Airport that is completely biometric and recently
saw the launch of express check-in.
How will it impact us?
It will have a profound impact on that
secondary screening process,
giving Customs a new way to split off
designated passengers earlier in the process.
Time saving
To aid efficiency and passenger experience.
Advances in algorithmic surveillance.
Movement of customers is studied.
Easy and quick procedures involving cut down of queues to authenticate identification of
travellers.
High on security aspects and intelligence gathering. Hence, less risky
Example: If an individual is able to swap passports with someone they physically
resemble, they might get through a human visual check, but an iris scan would catch
them