Biometrics at Airports: Iris Recognition demo

Experience how seamless passenger security control works with iris recognition.
www.sitasummit.aero
www.sita.aero


In the recent few years, self-service has become really the predominant way of processing passengers at airports. For the passengers that's a very enjoyable and comfortable situation because they keep control over the whole process during their complete journey throughout the airport. For airports and for airlines it's also a very interesting evolution, because self-service allows to increase the capacity of the airport without any significant extra investment.
However, there's one but, one single but.
The success of self-service, although it's so self-explaining, everybody likes it, it's a win for everybody, but it induces one potential risk because the lack of human contact between an airline operator and a passenger may induce a potential doubt on the identity of the passenger. Now this is definitely a problem for immigration and border police, but it's also a problem for airlines, because they really need to know who they're taking on board. This is a potential risk for the industry, that we need to address, and biometrics, typically, can solve this kind of problem. The system that we are presenting today is the newest generation of iris recognition. Iris allows for a very accurate identification of passengers, wherever they are in the airport down to the boarding gate. Apart from adding a security layer to the situation, it's also even allowing to take passenger facilitation to a next level. Now, how does this system work? It's really very simple. A passenger will walk into the capturing space of the camera, the camera will detect the face, will locate the eyes, will focus in the two eyes, take a short picture of your irises, convert it to a code and finally, that's it. This system has three key elements. One, it's accurate; it really allows to identify with a very high degree of security every individual passenger. But on top of that there is simplicity. All the passenger needs to do is just step into the space, look at the camera, and we are actually reverting the traditional process where the passenger had to stand in front of the camera, take instructions like move back a little, move forward, please look at the camera, please try again. Now it's very simple, you just walk in, you stop, you look, and you walk on. Simplicity at the level where it's becoming hard to make the system fail. The third element is speed. Identifying a passenger in an airport today with this system, takes merely two seconds. That's the speed of human verification at a very much higher accuracy. From an operational point of view, by integrating this type of camera into the SITA BioThenticate passenger identity management system, we are really offering an end-to-end airport platform that allows accurate identity management all over the place so it can cover airline applications, it can be integrated with border management, all it takes is collaboration, for the different stakeholders to join force, and it may take a while but they definitely will see the benefits of just sharing one system, sharing the cost, and all benefitting from the same information.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• SITA
• Innovation
• Travel
• Air
• Transport
• Industry
• IT Summit
• Demo
• Passenger
• Facilitation
• Security
• Security control
• Airport
• Technology
• Data
• System
• Border
• management
• Government
• Airlines
• Biometrics