ICAO committee says yes to face: ICAO sets the standard
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 225 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0969-4765
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This month's newsletter is centred around the use of biometrics in the travel and immigration sector. Perhaps the single most important announcement was by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which formally accepted proposals to use facial images as the global standard biometric in passports and other machine readable travel documents (see page 16). This is the announcement the industry has been waiting for. Over the next few years, countries will use the standard as a blueprint around which to design their biometric passport programmes. Importantly, each country's technology can be supplied by different vendors, as entire facial images, rather than non-interoperable templates, will be stored.
This creates a great opportunity for multiple facial recognition vendors to win contracts, rather than one huge contract being awarded to one supplier. Fingerprint and iris recognition vendors will be happy too, as there is the provision for secondary biometrics to be included in each country's scheme.
Another proposed immigration system -VISIT -will also be a lucrative contract. It is proposing to biometrically check all travellers requiring visas entering the USA, and will start by using fingerprint matching.
The VISIT system already has opponents voicing their concerns, however. One argument is the potential for the system to make passengers' lives worse than ever. Longer lines at airports could be a PR disaster, with biometrics inevitably being seen as the root cause of such misery. Careful processes need to be established to avoid this scenario.
One initiative looking at this sort of problem is the S-Travel programme. It will run an eagerly anticipated passenger trial later this year (see page 1). If it is proven that careful process design combined with new technology can increase security and also simplify passenger flow, then implementation on a wider scale could follow. As a frequent traveller myself, I am praying they succeed.