Electronic border control gates, or e-gates, saw an adoption and installation acceleration during the COVID-19 pandemic as contactless and low-contact passenger processing became a must-have. Today, even while e-gates are expanding to new niches, a new generation of technologies are being implemented alongside existing hardware to add extra points of authentication and identification, and to improve the reliability of the system’s operation.
Biometric recognition e-gates have been common for years in larger airports and more developed countries, with most systems using facial recognition, iris scanning, fingerprints, or a combination to authenticate passengers against their passport.
But now some airports — even the smallest — are rolling their own. Uzbek airport management company Air Marakanda is working with Samarkand International Airport, local companies and the national border service to install biometric e-gates at the airport, which serves Uzbekistan’s second city, population just over one million.
“The system incorporates document readers and high-resolution video cameras that carry out video surveillance and comparison of passengers’ biometric data with an identity document. Border Control and Air Marakanda have developed measures against unauthorised passage and algorithms to ensure single passage, recognition of luggage and items left unattended,” Air Marakanda explains.
Elsewhere, a next generation of technology is continuing to push the boundaries, expanding capabilities of existing gate hardware installation and thus reducing the need for all-new gates that would require significant capital investment — including new biometric, facial and iris recognition pods.
French aeronautical powerhouse Thales provides pods for a number of airports in multiple countries, including Spain, Switzerland, and France — where it is the hardware partner for the PARAFE national programme. Sébastien Guérémy, the company’s vice president for identification and verification solutions, tells us that “Thales has recently introduced two face pods to meet different use cases.”
These pods add an extra layer of data to wider border automation work, reducing border staffing requirements, while adding additional elements of identification and enabling algorithmic analysis. This analysis can, for example, help authorities to identify travellers who have overstayed visas.
The goal, Guérémy says, is to “simplify passenger enrolment and identification at border and airport checkpoints.”
Much of this work is being driven by regulatory requirements, including the European Union’s Entry/Exit System, or EES, initially proposed in 2016 and due to enter operation in summer 2023.
The work includes Thales’ Fly to Gate Face Pod (enabling facial recognition-based boarding), its Border Face Pod (EES-compliant self-service for passport control), and its Multimodal Biometric Pod (adding both facial and iris recognition at distance as identification factors).
“Thales Border Face Pod delivers high-quality face enrolment and face verification capabilities which meets the EU Entry/Exit System standards, delivering ISO 19794-5 images,” Guérémy explains. “The high-resolution touch screen includes travellers guidance and offers the ability to interact with a declarative form.”
The pod includes an embedded lighting module and can be integrated with existing border checkpoint hardware and installations, both for initial registration and for subsequent visit identification.
In addition to facial recognition, enabling iris recognition as an identity and authentication factor alongside fingerprints, passports and other ID cards is also useful for domestic law enforcement purposes, accessible to authorities via linked systems. Compared with facial recognition, iris recognition generally offers lower false matches and a greater number of distinctive points for identification — even, for example, between identical twins.
Guérémy explains that “the Thales Multimodal Biometric Pod is a brand new device for the concurrent acquisition of both face and iris images at a distance. The main goal is to enhance border control operations in terms of accuracy and speed.”
Iris recognition has been tested and trialled before, including with the UK’s Iris Recognition Immigration System, neatly abbreviated to IRIS, introduced in 2004. While popular with over a million enrolled travellers and extended from its initial five-year trial to nearly double its intended lifespan, the system was discontinued in 2013 in favour of facial recognition compared with the passport photo, primarily because of the cost of operating enrolment facilities at airports.
Today, advances in technology mean that Thales’s pods can operate at regular border control booths, both as scanners and low-overhead enrolment points.
“The device is able to perform the enrolment of travellers, registering face and iris template linked to a person’s identity, and the verification, matching stored template against face and iris images acquired at e-gates,” Guérémy notes.
Thales can connect the Multimodal Biometric Pod to e-gates already installed, attaching it with relative ease to the existing border hardware — a real benefit given that most border systems updated for e-gates are still in the early or middle part of their expected lifespans. Part of the pod package includes a software development kit (SDK) that enables the system to be integrated into the existing provisions.
“What really makes this device competitive,” Guérémy says, “is the unique capture distance, up to 1.5 meters, and the support of AI in terms of face tracking and capture.”
Many travellers identify unreliable or finicky e-gates as a passenger experience pain point, with a common complaint from some regular flyers that e-gates never work for them, sending them to the manual processing queue and further delay.
Sometimes this is down to a passport’s biometric chip not working, but other times it is down to a combination of hardware and software sensitivity or a scanner that is behind the technology curve. Better scanners, including those enabling iris scanning at distance, will fix many of these problems.
Iris at a distance is likely to play a substantial role in the future of biometrics.
“We expect to see a boom of this technology in the next ten years, mostly because it is very secure and completely contactless,” Guérémy says. “The natural evolution of this technology will be on-the-move. It means a passenger can be verified – when pre-registered in terms of their consent — while walking and approaching the e-gate, without the need to stand still in front of the pod.”
Author: John Walton
Published 18 July 2023
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