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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)
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
The day they do that for exit instead of entry the world will be a safer place.
Indeed! This is good news for all the slave construction workers who can't leave Dubai because their contractors have taken their passports. Now they can just walk out.
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).
This was the first thought that occurred to me. Now, those contractors won't be able to ask for their passports, particularly if they leave it back home. It's unbelievable how any country can allow people to confiscate the passports of their employees, making them indentured servants, if not downright slaves.
Never been a fan of that country, despite all the glitz that they manage to parade. A French-Armenian worker, who had worked 30 years in Saudi Arabia, was once asked what he thought of that country. His response: "Money can buy anything. Except civilization."
That's true for all the Muslim OPEC states, not just KSA.
Speaking for Australia and NZ, they do not do what was described. You have to queue, stop, insert your passport, take a ticket, proceed to a photo gate, insert the ticket, wait for it to take your 2D image, try to match the biometrics on the e-Passport and then it may let you in. I guess a better than 90% acceptance for the limited range of countries supported. However, if you are me with an Australian passport then your e-Passport has never worked in Australia (inbound or out): works flawlessly in NZ though. My e-Passport is not useful at e-Passport gates in Rome, so I guess that level of data sharing is not yet occurring.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Contrary to the parent comment, Australia absolutely requires a physical passport to be presented to an officer or an automated kiosk.
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.
For EU/EEA/Swiss citizens the job of border control in a Schengen country is simple. If the passport matches the person and there isn't an alert in an international police database let them in.
For non-EU citizens the job is more complicated. Check they are folloing the rules on time in verses time out using the stamps in the passport (AIUI they don't yet have a database for this though they are talking about creating one). Ask them some questions to assess the risk that they are an illegal immigrant pretending to be a visitor, and finally stamp the passport to record the entry.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register