Rome Fiumicino airport is trialling facial recognition technology at security and boarding.
The opt-in system from Lisbon-based Vision Box enables an ‘end-to-end’ biometric journey through the airport.
Upon arrival at the airport, the passenger’s face is photographed and matched against information in their passport and boarding pass.
It is then no longer necessary to show the documents at security and boarding, with facial recognition cameras used instead. Passengers using the system will use dedicated lanes.
Vision Box says no photographs are saved, with the system “temporarily processing the biometric coordinates of the face, similarly to what was already occurring with e-gates for automated border control”.
The company says that after boarding the images are deleted, and that the system complies with EU Data Privacy regulations.
Rome Fiumicino will trial the system for six months.
Airports around the world have been turning to facial recognition both to speed up processing times and – they argue – to improve security.
Tokyo Narita Airport to introduce end-to-end facial recognition in 2020
Booths at an airport in China can display a passenger’s personalised flight information when they look at it.
Spanish airline Iberia is currently piloting a new facial recognition app, which it describes as the “world’s first biometric project to enable passengers to identify themselves via a mobile device app instead of appearing at a physical location”.
Customers are asked to upload a photo of their photo ID within the Iberia app, and then subsequently to take a “brief video selfie”, allowing the software to verify a match between the photo and video. The biometric profile is then submitted to the airport operator’s database.
Passengers then also need to “associate their boarding pass to Asturias or Brussels with their biometric profile” before checking in online, enabling the system to offer them the option of using facial recognition to pass through security control and the boarding gates J40 and J58 at T4.
Read more about the use of facial recognition in airports here:
