Ever been delayed on a flight because of straggling fellow passengers?

That might be an annoyance of the past at Singapore’s Changi airport which is testing facial recognition systems that could, in future, help locate lost travellers or those spending a little too much time in the duty-free shops.

Changi Airport, ranked the world’s best for six years straight in a survey by air travel consultancy Skytrax, is looking at how it can use the latest technologies to solve many problems – from cutting taxiing times on the runway to quicker predictions of flight arrivals.

It comes as the island state embarks on a ‘smart nation’ initiative to utilise technology to improve lives, create economic opportunity and build community ties. However the proposed use of cameras mounted on lampposts that are linked to facial recognition software has raised privacy concerns.

Steve Lee, Changi Airport Group’s chief information officer, told Reuters the airport’s experiments are not from a “big brother” perspective but solve real problems.

“We have lots of reports of lost passengers… so one possible use case we can think of is, we need to detect and find people who are on the flight. Of course, with permission from the airlines,” Lee said.

Facial recognition technology typically allows users to match the faces of people picked up on cameras with those in databases.

Lee said they have tested technology that could allow for this, and are working with various businesses, adding that they should have some capability to do this in a year’s time.

While he declined to provide names of the firms involved, France’s Idemia, previously known as OT-Morpho, has previously provided some facial recognition technology to Changi.

Chinese firm Yitu, which recently opened its first international office in Singapore, told Reuters it was in discussions with Changi Airport Group. Yitu says its facial recognition platform is capable of identifying more than 1.8 billion faces in less than three seconds.

Changi’s newest terminal, T4, already uses facial recognition technology to offer self-service options at check-in, bag drop, immigration and boarding.

The technology means there are fewer queues and fewer visible airport or security staff.

Luggage is dropped at unmanned booths that take your photo and match it against your passport. You are snapped again at an automated security gate at immigration – a picture that is used to verify your identity at the boarding gate.

Changi is exploring how facial recognition can be implemented in its three older terminals for automated bag drop and immigration.

The airport sees T4 as a test bed for its fifth terminal, which will be up and running in about a decade.

“Today you take passport, you show your face and you show your boarding pass,” said Lee, adding it may, however, be possible to use biometrics instead.

“Then actually in the future, you just take your face. You don’t need your passport,” he said.

Other technology trials underway at the airport use sensors to measure when an aircraft pushes back from the gate and when it takes off, data that has improved decision-making and shaved about 90 seconds off aircraft taxiing time per flight during peak hours, Lee said.

Another program uses artificial intelligence that gathers wind, weather and landing direction to learn to better predict flight arrival times.

With such technology, the airport is now able to estimate a flight’s landing time when it’s two hours away having previously only been able to make an accurate estimate 30 minutes to an hour ahead.

Lee said this helps create efficiencies in everything from gate planning to arrival queues.

He said a smart nation strategy begins at a country’s airport.

“You can’t say you are a smart nation when you come to the airport and it’s not so smart.”

source : Singapore’s Changi airport

“By smoothing out the immigration entry and exit processes for Japanese people, we can have more immigration officials run investigations on foreign nationals,” said a news release distributed by the ministry on Tuesday.

With 40 million travelers from overseas expected to come into Japan in 2020, and 60 million expected in 2030, it’s easy to predict that airports will be short on immigration staff, a Justice Ministry official said.
The new gates will feature cameras that take photographs of passengers. By using facial recognition technology, they will match the photo with image data retrieved from passports. The whole process will take less than 15 seconds.

The ministry introduced similar unmanned gates that use fingerprint authentication in 2007, but less than 10 percent of passengers used them in 2016. It’s possible the gates were unpopular because they required users to register their fingerprints before their flights, the official said. The new gates will not require such advance registration.
Three units of this type are scheduled to be installed at Haneda airport in Tokyo as early as in this October, to be used by Japanese passengers on arrival.
The gates are scheduled to be introduced at three other international airports — Narita, Chubu and Kansai — by the end of 2018.
To be able to install the new gates, Article 54 of the Ordinance for Enforcement of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act must be amended to allow machines to store disembarkation records on passports, rather than the data being recorded by immigration officials manually applying a stamp.
The amended law is scheduled to be enforced from mid-October, according to the official. The ministry is accepting public comments on the amendment until Aug. 3.
For foreign nationals who come to Japan often on business, automated gates have been available at major airports since last November.
However, an applicant must meet certain requirements to register as a trusted traveler, including being employed full time at a public or private organization for a year and having visited Japan at least twice within the 12-month period prior to arrival.

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have led to a sharp rise in the number of e-Gates that have been deployed at border entry points around the world.

While the implementation of e-Gates allows for the expedited processing of passengers and a more tactical deployment of border control agents, questions have inevitably been raised surrounding the related security issues.

In the UK, for instance, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) recently launched an investigation into an incident, which saw a passenger pass through the facial recognition e-Gates at Manchester Airport having inadvertently swapped passports with their travelling companion. Despite this lapse, however, the UKBA explained that “there was no breach of the Border and that the technology performed correctly”, and the passengers were stopped by a supervising immigration officer.

A total of 55 facial recognition e-Gates are currently being tested at 13 terminals throughout the UK, while they will soon be deployed in Heathrow Terminal 3 and Gatwick Airport’s South Terminal.

“The systems are in a trial stage and have been evaluated,” said Brodie Clark, Head of Border Force for the UK Border Agency. “Although the evaluation is still going through the approval stage, indications are that the technology works in a border control context alongside the conventional manual control.”

While the e-Gates are “proven to be as effective at facial matching as a human is”, Clark explained that they should not be viewed as “infallible”.

He said: “They are one of a number of systems that we can use to support frontline operations. It should be noted that no system of checking, including using trained officers, can be 100% foolproof, and so the gates are always supervised by a Border Officer when they are in operation. This combination of technology and experienced officer produces a fast and secure alternative to the conventional manual control.”

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