Thursday, November 26, 2009

News: Facial Recognition Technology to be used at Cardiff Airport

Frome the Register: Cardiff now joins Manchester Airport in allowing inbound passengers to have their passports checked automatically with facial recognition systems. The option is available for adults with chipped biometric passports, issued since 2006, which, amongst other information, have a picture of the holder encoded on them that can be compared to the subject checking through.

The article refers to the embarassing revelations last year that facial recognition technology in use at Manchester airport was unable to distinguish between pictures of Wynona Ryder and Osama Bin Laden. This happened because the machines initially gave far too many false negatives, and in reponse staff turned the settings so low they effectively 'switched them off'.

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