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Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

nextgov.com

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Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#111

Post by michaelt »

solatic wrote: post #104
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 w…

  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
Even simpler than that, some UK airports have 'epassport gates' * [1] where you present your passport on a scanner and your face is photographed at the same time, so it only needs to compare your face against your passport.

Sadly the gates are still slow and unreliable, even at that seemingly simple task.

* Admittedly for immigration rather than boarding [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPassport_gates

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#112

Post by mbel »

noobermin wrote: post #21
refurb wrote: post #17

Once facial recognition becomes commonplace, the impact will be huge. “What were your whereabouts on the night of June 5th?” “I was at home all night.” “You’re lying. We have confirmation your face was recognized at the gas station, grocery store and bank between the hours of 7 and 9pm.” That sends a shiver down my spine.

Is this situation any different from security footage already at gas stations and the like? I suppose automatic aggregation of said data is more problematic.

And is this situation any different from location logs based on mobile phone? It's obviously easier to leave s phone than a face at home, my point is that we have already pretty much agreed to be tracked most of the time.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#113

Post by n4r9 »

rlpb wrote: post #110
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

> 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

If only! At the (UK) Tesco metro near my workplace, the staff have this insane habit of keeping half or fewer of the available self-checkout machines in operation. The rest of them have a big symbol like a stop-sign and are unusable.

Only if a big queue builds up will the single attending staff member go round and laboriously make the other machines available, whilst simultaneously having to attend to the frequent weighing issues caused by the machines. By the time they're done with this the lunchtime rush is practically over.

I mentioned this to a work colleague who suggested the reason is that they want to reduce the amount of time counting cash out of the machines at the end of the day, so having fewer machines in operation is preferable.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#114

Post by wila »

goodcanadian wrote: post #77
toweringgoat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. And they're essentially acting as outward immigration, since the airline's passport records are used to mark the unwanted/foreigners (like me) as departed. But the system is quite flaky, my arrival/departure record is missing a few departures - and I think that's where CBP want to improve things, possibly so they can more legitimately claim that someone overstayed when their records are incomplete. (And I gu…

The airline checks passports on the way out as they are required to bring you back if you are denied entry at the destination. They try hard not to pay that cost, so they want to make sure you have a passport, all required visas, haven't been barred from the destination, and so on.

Normally they do not really pay tor that cost either as your return ticket is void after being denied entry. But it is indeed inconvenient for them.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#115

Post by kalleboo »

jacquesm wrote: post #93
CaptainZapp wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

It can also depend on the airline - only some airlines check passports within Schengen (I've only heard of it being required by LCCs)

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#116

Post by kalleboo »

toweringgoat wrote: post #63
T-hawk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last has to be it. Every flight I've ever boarded has been bottlenecked at the jetway by people getting themselves and their carryons loaded and situated, not the speed of scanning the boarding document. At best, it means they boarded an A380 through multiple doors in parallel instead of all through a single scanning location. This only matters for planes big enough to have multiple entrances.

They always board A380s through multiple doors. But they probably had a flight full of Germans - Americans tend to take a lot longer to get themselves sat down than most Europeans do, and spend a lot more time faffing around with their bag and belongings while blocking the aisle. The Japanese are still the most efficient at boarding though.

There's also the difference of airlines. Airlines that charge extra for checked bags will have more people messing about trying to fit in a carryon, not finding room, etc. And U.S. carriers tend to have some of the worst policies. (in other places LCCs have the same policies but they also tend to have smaller planes)

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#117

Post by hidenotslide »

Blaiz0r wrote: post #97
jacquesm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False positives are a thing.

Sure but with 99% accuracy across 3 different locations, the chances are, the suspect is lying.

1) Those tests results would be highly correlated, so you wouldn't necessarily be much more than 99% accurate still.

2) If the prior probability of someone committing a crime on a given night is low, you are in the classical example of false positives doing harm via Bayes rule.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#118

Post by acjohnson55 »

melkiaur wrote: post #109
acjohnson55 wrote: post #45

I 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 w…

Ah yeah, I've done bus boarding before (although not the Dulles thing), wasn't considering that. Still seems like you could time that boarding of the earlier vehicle to just start earlier.

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#119

Post by dhimes »

Johnny555 wrote: post #9

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 -- 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…

Definitely not a time-saving measure. The time limiting factor is the actual getting-on-the-plane-and-putting-your-carryon-away-and-getting-out-of-the-aisle part. Often I get my boarding pass scanned and go stand in line on the gangway.

In fact a mathematical algorithm was developed for loading faster[1] but I'm not sure anybody tried that yet.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html

Re: Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recognition Boarding

#120

Post by dhimes »

nollbit wrote: post #80
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actual scanning might be slower, but the queues are much shorter for self-scanning at the stores where I by groceries. Also, where I live we have portable scanners. You pick up a scanner when you enter the store, you scan all your groceries and put them directly in the bag (or under the stroller) and when you reach the exit you leave the scanner and pay at a terminal and off you go.

Portable scanners FTW! Once you get competent with them it's ridiculous how much time you save. Add to that bringing your own bags and you are scanned and out in little more time than it took to do the actual shopping.

Every now and then you get audited, but I'll happily pay that price in order to have the scanner.

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