Jane's Airport Review: Face of biometrics is about to change, says leading industry official

1 December 2007

Jane's Airport Review - December 2007/January 2008

Reality has consistently failed to live up to expectations in the deployment of facial, fingerprint, iris and voice-based security systems inteh aviation sector, the former Chairman of the International Association of Biometrics has admitted to Jane's.

David McIntosh said that the situation is about to improve despine this disappointing track record: "Advances in biometric capability are at last beginning to deliver effective real-world solutions and the air travel industry is set to become a major beneficiary."

McIntosh was speaking during the Biometrics 2007 exhibition in London on 17-19 October.

"The biometrics industry has been defined by broken dreams and false hopes for 30 years," he said. "We have to stop making brash promises and go ahead and do it."

McIntosh, who is also Chief Executive Officer of OmniPerception, said that the UK company is poised to introduce a light-immune facial biometrics system that would be especially suitable for airport staff access control.

The system - called CheckPoint™ - has been deployed in banks and casinos but not yet in airports. "I have been told that it will be selected for a three-month trial at a major UK airport [to begin] shortly," he said, adding: "We've been looking at airports for four years but haven't pushed it because of a lack of technology. And now that we have the technological solution, the main stumbling block is belief - airports don't believe this stuff works, partly because of over-optimistic statements of biometrics' potential after 9/11."

McIntosh said he looked forward to the UK trial as "a watershed for our ambitions and for the wider biometrics industry". He described staff access control for airside areas as "the weakest link in airport security", because the swipe cards and passes commonly used by staff in airports can be stolen or duplicated.

"My understanding is that the DfT [UK Department for Transport] is about to plug that loophole and legislate or regulate for more positive identification of staff access airside," he added. "As I understand it the solution will be biometric, which is clearly the best way forward for positive ID."

McIntosh believes that there has been an "underlying Catch 22 situation over the last 25 years" in which the obvious biometric to use is facial recognition, but he admitted that automatic facial biometric soolutions "simply haven't worked well enough to deliver the goods".

"Lighting has been a killer for facial recognition, until very recently," McIntosh said. The factor that he highlighted as having altered informed opinion is the development of light-immune technology to capture images for enrolment and verification at teh point of access. "This creates a whole new set of possibilities for airport staff access," he claimed.

McIntosh admitted, however, that the "tie-in between passport images and a biometric system is much more problematic". He went on to explain that the "ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organisation] is trying to address this issue by setting standards for lighting and image quality", adding: "As long as the image is good enough and in the right format - and provided that the lighting is also standardised at the point of entry - you get closer to good performance."

Yet the fact remains that the "ICAO standards assume natural lighting so they cannot avail themselves fo the best light-immune technology available",  McIntosh argued.

Although fully ready for deployment is staff access control, systems such as CheckPoint™ still have some way to go before being used for passenger identity checks. "We'll eventually bridge the gap to compare light-immune images to on-site photos," McIntosh predicted. This would be done through a process known as photometric normalisation, by which  images are measured and adapted to take lighting variations into account.