Elevating the Travel Experience Through Seamless and Secure Identity Verification
While the advantages of swift, accurate passenger verification are clear, not all solutions are created equal. Aviation stakeholders need to assess the potential challenges that identity verification technologies must overcome in airport settings. There are a variety of key best practices to consider for the selection and deployment of the facial recognition technology.
Whether by air, water or rail, the travel industry depends on the ability to confirm a passenger’s identity over and over again, from check-in and bag drop to security screening and boarding. Essential identity verification touchpoints must not cause long lines or repeated ID checks without easily frustrating large numbers of people who are anxious to board and be on their way.
Biometric technology solves this problem and is primed to modernize ID verification as passengers move from checkpoint to checkpoint more securely, and with less hassle. This is especially true when implementing facial recognition technology, which improves the passenger experience and makes terminals safer and more efficient while strengthening security screenings and border control.
Fully realizing the benefits of facial recognition technology requires best practices for optimal performance including enhancing facial capture with AI, using on-device biometric processing to improve performance and data protection, and fighting fraud through advanced presentation attack detection (PAD) with passive liveness detection. Biometrics is only part of the solution, though, and it is also important to bind this data with biographical information to create a “trust anchor” for moving travelers seamlessly through the terminal. Those who successfully deploy these solutions reap a variety of benefits for their operations and for the travelers they serve.
Creating a Safe, Seamless Experience
It is crucial to identify travelers from the very beginning of their journey. It enables operators to create the trust anchor of an irrefutable identity verification session that enables an entire chain of seamless authentication events. To accomplish this, operators need a combination of facial recognition solutions and identity verification (IDV) technologies for matching travelers to their government-issued IDs, such as passports — a process called biometric enrollment.
Biometric enrollment is the foundation for this trust anchor. During the enrollment, travelers take a selfie and their faces are matched to their government IDs and the two are bound into an encrypted, high-trust digital credential. Once this process is complete, every subsequent identity verification can be managed with a simple face scan. Because the sensitive data is bound through biometric data that is unique for each individual, this data only needs to be checked on the initial enrollment. Authorities can now know that, for instance, the person who just checked in is also the one dropping off a piece of luggage, which is important both for security purposes and to ensure that the luggage ends up in the right hands at the end of the journey. This also improves airport efficiency while reducing the number of staff needed at each checkpoint.
Key Best Practices
For the facial recognition portion of the solution, the camera device used must be purpose-built for the task. Standard cameras simply cannot provide the quality of image capture that is essential for accurate facial recognition. Only a camera designed for facial recognition application can minimize false positives or negatives and associated operational disruptions, security breaches and possible reputational damage.
Here are the top ten attributes of a facial recognition camera:
1. Operates in “must-work” environments such as border crossings and banking ATMs. Features like multispectral imaging enable the industry’s leading cameras to capture the best possible images regardless of bright sunlight or when limited to no-light conditions.
2. Provides advanced security features — such as encryption at rest and in transit, secure boot, and injection attack rejection — to maximize security and data protection from unauthorized access and replay attacks.
3. Delivers exceptional “in the wild” recognition and real-world matching despite variations in lighting, backgrounds, poses, user demographics, heights, skin tones and accessibility requirements.
4. Offers distortion-free field of view, especially in the highly recommended vertically aligned (portrait) orientation for accommodating people’s different heights.
5. Supports flexible edge, local host and server-based biometric processing to meet the needs of specific business workflows.
6. Maximizes throughput and reduces latency with edge capture — the live processing of images — to support real-time identification without the need for a local host or communication with servers.
7. Uses ethically-built and AI-trained algorithms to promote the inclusivity necessary for accurate matching across diverse demographics.
8. Prevents fraud through advanced Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) capabilities that detect spoof attempts that compromise authentication security and integrity using 3D masks, printed pictures or digital images. The camera should be successfully tested for compliance with the ISO 30107-3 standard for these capabilities.
9. Is designed for seamless integration into self-service kiosks, ATMs, POS terminals, e-gates and more. This enables facial recognition to be added at the edge to a variety of business use cases.
10. Is backed by a vendor with staying power to protect the technology investment while mitigating the risk of reputational damage that might result from a breach.
Success at a Prominent Seaport
A five-location regional seaport in Indonesia has adopted these best practices integrating an HID® U.ARE.U™ facial recognition camera identification system and HID ATOM™ document reader into a self-service automated border control (ABC) e-gate system. The automated solution processes passengers much more quickly than was possible with its previous manual identity-verification processes, while significantly improving the traveler experience. It is set to be extended to the country’s international airports and is a model for other terminals seeking to modernize their border control infrastructure.
Serving approximately 500,000 people annually, the regional seaport is one of the most-trafficked border spots between Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Extremely long wait queues for international departures and arrivals were a severe pain point, but with the new solution, an intuitive passenger verification experience begins by simply approaching the ABC gate and placing a passport on the ATOM document reader.
The data is scanned and immediately matched with Electronic Visa on Arrival (e-VoA), e-Visa or visa-free data. Once confirmed, the first gate opens and the traveler steps forward in front of the camera for a face scan. After the system confirms a match between the passport photo and the passenger’s face, a second gate opens and the visitor moves through — all within seconds, greatly improving passenger throughput and operational efficiencies.
The solution not only makes inspection easier and faster, but it also prioritizes state security by connecting the crossing system with the Interpol database and other deterrence databases. This helps prevent the entry of foreign travelers involved in crimes or other unlawful activities. On the port side, operational efficiency gains include reduced manual workloads for immigration officers, who can now focus on other tasks.
This and many other deployment examples demonstrate the benefits of facial recognition technology for the travel sector. The benefits are fully realized when the technology is bound to biographic information at check-in, enabling travelers to simply use their faces throughout the terminal. The simplicity and convenience of this model is propelling facial-recognition adoption beyond departure and arrival processes to VIP lounges, duty-free shopping, and anywhere ID verification is required.
