Contrary to what most travellers think, customs officials are keen on moving people through airports as quickly as possible, as the Australian Customs Service is proving with its SmartGate automatic passport control system.
BiometriX 2009 was privileged to view a presentation by Michelle Kinnane, national manager, strategic development (passengers) with the Australian Customs and Border Protection Services, examining how the Customs Service is using facial recognition to speed passengers through Australia’s airports. Although it has been rolled out to limited travellers, the SmartGate programme is proving a runaway success; sadly, you need an ePassport to use it and it is only available to travellers from Australia and New Zealand at the moment.
As an island, Australia is in a fairly unique position that its border entrance points are more easily controllable, people come by ship or plane. At the moment, 90% of travellers come via the air and an annual passenger increase of 5% is expected until 2016.
To process increasing numbers of travellers within existing floor space without comprising standards of border protection, Australia’s customs service decided to try an automated facial recognition biometric passport control solution. Not only would the solution speed the flow of people processed, but it would free up customs staff to do more important work that cannot be automated.
The solution is SmartGate. Travellers over 18 years of age with a ePassport (from New Zealand or Australia) arriving in Australia are directed to a kiosk where the system scans their passport and checks their eligibility to enter through a few questions on a touch sensitive screen. Then the traveller moves to the scanning gate where their facial features are scanned and compared to the image stored in the ePassport. If the images match and there are no other queries, the individual passes through; alternatively travellers are referred to a customs agent.
Using ePassports for automated passport control is a great deterrent to the use of forged or stolen passports and helps combat identity fraud, which is rapidly increasing in all countries around the world. Machine readable ePassports are harder to forge and it is also harder to fool a machine into accepting fake documents.
Although these passports can store all manner of identification information, currently only facial biometrics are stored in Australia along with the other details normally printed on a passport. The process itself takes about 45 seconds per person, excluding the time taken queueing. Of course, with a faster automated system the queueing time is also reduced significantly.
The system was designed to be as easy for the most technically-deficient people to use and also had to be robust to handle continuous use and a few heavy handed clients. To date the SmartGate programme has been deemed a success by customs and travellers. Most of the users have said they will happily use it again to speed their process through passport control.
SmartGate is currently available at Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Melbourne, Perth and Auckland International Airports for arriving travellers. It will be rolled out to other nationalities using ePassports over time. Part of the efficient process in Australia is the efficient departure processes in other countries, making it more difficult to organise a broad roll out.
Although facial recognition forms a key component of SmartGate, Kinnane says biometrics can not be used in isolation. To be effective and reliable it needs to be integrated into an end-to-end business system delivering business value – in this case the business of streamlining passengers’ passport control pathway. And as in any business, implementing it successfully required buy-in and acceptance from all airport staff – which is the normal change management process when introducing new and innovative business processes.
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