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Dubai Airport Will Use Biometric Scanning By 2020 To Replace Entry With Passport (gulfnews.com)
dryriver quotes a report from Gulf News: For visitors or residents coming in to Dubai, a new face-recognition software in the offing at the Dubai International Airport will enable them to walk straight to the baggage claim area after deplaning without having to stop at passport control. British start-up ObjectTech announced that they will work with the Dubai government to install biometric tunnels that scan people's faces as they walk to baggage reclaim. The "biometric border" walkway takes a 3D scan of people's faces as they enter the airport and checks it against a digital passport using face-recognition software. If this project is completed, passengers arriving at Dubai airport will be able to step off their flight and walk straight to baggage reclaim via biometric verification tunnels -- allowing them to be registered into the country using a pre-approved and entirely digitized passport.
How many identification errors allowed per 1000? (officially, I mean)
The day they do that for exit instead of entry the world will be a safer place.
lucm, indeed.
nt.
How does this work where people are forced to live in cloth bags because of their stone age superstitions?
passengers arriving at Dubai airport will be able to step off their flight and walk straight to baggage reclaim via biometric verification tunnels...
Best argument this week for traveling carry-on luggage only.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Qatar has been doing this for over 5 years. Residents of Qatar don't need to show their passports. Instead, they put an ID card into a machine, then have their iris and their fingerprint scanned to confirm their identity.
This is so fucking common... Australia, NZ, Singapore, other ME states...
There must be well over 50 airports at least that are currently doing this.
Sounds like a sheik in the Dubai royal family has been fooled into paying billions for technology that doesn't exist.
Automated photomatching isn't that good, even under ideal circumstances. This startup claims to be able to recognize people while they are walking.
Dubai had over 80 million air travelers in 2016, so unless the error rate is incredibly small, this is going to be a big waste of money (like so many other things in Dubai).
"Deplane" pisses me off immensely. The word to use is "disembark".
I'm sure that there will be many problems in the beginning. But this is a nice controlled environment, with lots of test subjects. And you can get the nicely uniformed officials to pull the people that the system has trouble with, find out who they actually are, and work on improving matching their faces with their photos. Something you cannot do if you were testing this system on the street.
And pretty soon you'll have a system that is MUCH better than anything we have today, that you can put on any street corner, anywhere in the world.... with a nice starter database of proven to be accurate passport details to boot.
When I visited Israel, I saw they had a biometric passport control system for Israeli citizens, which apparently relies on a combination of hand geometry and facial imaging. I went over to check it out - it was pretty cool, you stick your hand into a field of pegs and based on that it measures the sizes of your hand bones.
This biometric system seems to have several advantages over Dubai's system. First and mostly importantly, it supplements the passport rather than replacing it. Biometric measurements are often not unique. If one in a million people shares your fingerprint or hand geometry, then even a small country will have multiple people with the same biometric, and it will be impossible to know who is entering the country. But if the biometric is combined with a passport swipe, then the chance of a randomly picked biometric matching the passport is extremely small, and your border is secure.
Second, hand geometry is a much better biometric than facial images. It is relatively constant - hand geometry is not expected to change much in adults (children aren't eligible for the system, BTW). This is in contrast to facial geometry, which changes frequently due to haircuts, makeup, shaving, illness, and plastic surgery. Perhaps more importantly, you know when your measurements were taken. There's no way of finding out what your hand measurements are except by putting your hand into a special machine. So nobody except border control can possibly possess your biometrics (unless border control's database was hacked). As for your facial features, anyone who passes you on the street can photograph and scan your face. So anyone can fake them and pretend to be you.
I work in this field; my company tests this technology in airports.
All the vendors will tell you that their facial biometric software is now good enough to use for this mission critical traveller identification : my experience is that it isn't.
There is a *big* difference between doing this face-on-the-move matching and automated matching of a face to a passport.
With use of a scanned chip passport, the document itself can be checked and verified using the physical and electronic security measures present in the document, and the validated passport is then a statement of identity. We then match the traveller's face photo to the passport chip photo 1:1. This works very well.
We do what is called 'liveness detection' to make sure we're focussed on the face and that the traveller is not holding up a photo, or the camera isn't picking up their t-shirt image. We take a lot of photos during the matching process until we find one above the required threshhold.
The passport-less setup is very different. We take a lot of photos as the traveller presents to the gate, and we have to do a 1:N match to try and match the traveller to one of the expected travellers in a 4-hour slot.
The problem here is false-positives. If the biometric algorithm matches one of person A's images to person B, we think that A is B. We clear A through the border as B. Then person B turns up.... Airport clearance security have to stop person B, because why are they trying to cross the border when they've already left it? They have to do this even though they know it's likely that B is completely innocent, and A is gone.
If person A was on a security watchlist, they've just evaded border control.
The 1:N matching modes are way worse in practice than the 1:1 matching modes.
Imagine a busy airport with 50,000 people per day crossing the border. If we ask business how many mis-identified people the technology is allowed to let across the border, they'll tell you that 1 a day is too many. This implies a false positive rate of less than 0.000001%; the tech is not that good. The false positive rates we see are around 1 in 500. And for certain ethnic groups the false positive rates are way higher than this, the algorithms just don't do well for those ethnicities.
There are places this tech works quite well, for example in casino monitoring where they're trying to keep someone out. That is a different problem - they get a lot of photos of the person, casino security do a visual cross check if they get a hit, and because the person is only a problem if they're in the casino, they're available for security to ask for id.
But in airports and border crossing there is a significant risk involved.
Iris checking is much better, it has a much lower error rate, but iris scans aren't commonly included in the LDS on chip passports.
Does that mean this Moslem country will ban full face coverings like niqabs and burkhas?