News

Sydney Airport test of biometrics deemed success

February 5, 2004

SYDNEY, Australia -- Frequent flyers could soon be able to bypass customs officers and have their identity checked by face-scanning machines, despite some doubts over their reliability.

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Customs Service developed SmartGate, a facial-recognition system, to speed up passenger processing without reducing security. It has been in trial for more than a year at Sydney Airport, where it was tested on the Qantas airlines crew.

In practice, passengers step into a kiosk and place their passport photograph face down on a scanner. Five simultaneous photos are taken of the person, then compared to that in the passport.

Independent specialists called the system a success, despite the fact that it let through 1 percent of imposters and rejected 2 percent of genuine passport holders, the article said.

Dr. James Wayman, a security researcher at San Jose State University and one of two U.S. experts who evaluated the system, denied there was an unacceptable risk.

"In one test, 100 company employees attempted to impersonate someone other than themselves and eight of them were falsely accepted by the system. That is a very low rate of false accepts," he said in the article.