I don't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing a facial recognition scanner where the camera first physically moves up/down to match the height of the person (which takes a few seconds), and then takes a photo. Quite a ridiculous system if you ask me.
Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
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Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
On most flights within the Schengen area your boarding pass is no more manually checked. That's unless you fly business or are a high value status customer. Instead you just scan your boarding pass / smart phone yourself. I can't imagine that this is in any way slower than a face scan.
I fly from Schiphol with great regularity and my boarding pass is definitely checked every time by a person (as is my passport) right before boarding the plane. Usually the same happens on the return leg, and the majority of my trips are within Schengen.
I know at the Oslo airport it's fairly common to never show ID or your boarding pass to a person if you're flying within Schengen. --Check in at the automated kiosk, put on your own luggage tag, scan the tag at the bag drop, and you're done there. Passing through security means scanning your boarding pass rather than showing it to someone most of the time, and finally many of the gates have automated doors where you scan your boarding pass again to board the plane. The same applies to other Scandinavian airports as well.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#103I don't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing a facial recognition scanner where the camera first physically moves up/down to match the height of the person (which takes a few seconds), and then takes a photo. Quite a ridiculous system if you ask me.
Sounds like EU passport control.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#104The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%. The process el…
>> The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing >> Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos I think what they mean is that they carried out laboratory tests where a test subject stood facing the system's camera and the system tried to match their face to a database of pictures of peoples' faces, then decided whether the subject's face matched…
> e.g. use a small database, rather than the entire US passport photo database plus photos of visiting foreigners
Doing so would be wildly inefficient. You need your passport to check in for your flight. When boarding the plane, you don't need to check someone's face against the entire passport database, only against the passports which have been checked into the flight, which is particularly important in terminals with shared domestic/international departures where entry is possible without a passport and the passport can be transferred to somebody after check-in.
But the main reason why it's anyway infeasible is because flights are rarely full of people of a single nationality; scanning peoples' faces against a wide-ranging passport photo database effectively means scanning their faces against some kind of global database of the faces of everybody from around the world. Assembling a database like that, apart from the ethical issues, is politically infeasible.
Remember - this system doesn't advocate for people to not need their passports at all when traveling. They still need them - just not after check-in. The question is whether the system is more or less accurate than a human being at matching passport photos to faces, and based on what we know about racial bias, the answer to that is probably that facial recognition is more accurate by now.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#105But people have similar faces called eigen faces in Mathematics. This is not Secure because faces are not unique. Similar to finding a similar to you looking face on the street/internet. Humans have an average faces and then diverge from that.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#106On a full flight there's really no need to check at all. If too many people board you'll catch it when the spurious passenger tries to take a paid passenger's seat. And if identity actually mattered (hint: it doesn't), well it's already been "screened" via the purchase and TSA checkpoint tests. Planes flew for decades without any matching of passengers to tickets, and tickets were frequently resold (especially unused…
Planes also flew for decades without locks on the cockpit doors, but that doesn’t make it a good idea in the modern world.
How many tragedies have been enabled by suicidal pilots + the locked doors? I know of at least one case in the Alps and pretty sure there was another in India recently enough?
I'm not sure they come out that far ahead really, though obviously the incidents they were designed to counter are bigger and more headline grabbing.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
On most flights within the Schengen area your boarding pass is no more manually checked. That's unless you fly business or are a high value status customer. Instead you just scan your boarding pass / smart phone yourself. I can't imagine that this is in any way slower than a face scan.
I fly from Schiphol with great regularity and my boarding pass is definitely checked every time by a person (as is my passport) right before boarding the plane. Usually the same happens on the return leg, and the majority of my trips are within Schengen.
In my experience some airports check but most do not. At least Arlanda, Brussels, Chopin and Vienna did not check when I last was there.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#108Most European airports only scan your boarding card for flights within Schengen and do not check any ID, and many of them let you scan it yourself.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#109I can't remember a time when I boarded a plane that I didn't have to wait in a queue on the jet bridge. How does this help with that? Also, I'm constantly seeing people accidentally end up in the wrong row or seat because they misread the label up above. Invariably, everyone takes out boarding passes to sort it out. Reeks of a trojan horse to get more pervasive face scanners in place.
I've only been once in Washington, and it was ages ago. But they have this incredible system where they put you in a massive bus (At first I didn't even realise it was a bus, it looked more like a room), and the bus goes to the plane, lifts ups, and docks to the plane door. So, it's very important they can cram the people in the bus as fast as possible. Do a google image search for "Dulles buses", you'll understand what I'm on about.
But this benefit (of accelerated boarding) would apply to any airport where you don't go into a jet bridge but have to take the bus to go to the plane.
Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding
#110The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing Presumably it's 99% effective at matching random faces to the photos -- if a terrorist group has a pool of 1000 stolen passports, with a system that's only 99% effective at maching a random photo, I think they could do much better at finding a person (perhaps with some surgical alterations) that fits in that 1%. The process el…
Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about. In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases. The real b…
> The real benefit...
It is possible for there to be multiple benefits. In fact this is the most desirable, since when there is an immediate economic benefit to both sides, it is incentivized to happen.
In the case of supermarket self-scanning, sure, the supermarket can reduce costs.
However, the benefit to the customer is in a shorter total time through checkout. Entropy causes customers to arrive at checkouts in spurts, rather than there being a steady flow. It is expensive for stores for checkout operators to remain idle (and would be passed on in higher prices). So customers have to queue instead of there being more checkout operators available during spurts.
On the other hand, the cost of maintaining extra self-checkout machines costs very little. So in practice, they tend to be available to handle spurts of activity, resulting in faster overall checkout times for customers too.
For the stores: yes, reduced costs. For the customers: reduced costs result in lower prices in healthy markets, and also time to traverse checkouts is faster.
The same can be applied to airlines. Fewer staff at the line at the gate results in reduced staffing costs: sure. But also: less standing around in lines and less juggling at the front of the line (especially for the infirm, or those with kids, etc) is also a clear benefit to passengers.
It is cynical to ignore the other half of the benefits and focus just on costs. And in any case, reduced costs for the company results in lower prices for consumers.