Contactless Biometrics and Related Technologies for Border Checks On-the-Go
Channel: British Computer Society Open Source Specialists
Date: 2020-08-21

Presented by Prof. James Ferryman (University of Reading)

With COVID-19 hygenic identity verification becomes a crucial issue yet has to be effective and meet travellers¹ and border guards¹ demands on reasonable processing times and privacy. This talk will first present the background in development and deployment of Automated Border Control (ABC), specifically ABC eGates at airports, based on face biometrics. The talk will then briefly present the outcomes of a 4-year EU project called FastPass which sought to develop a harmonised approach to eGates toward more seamless identity confirmation for all border crossing types. The talk will then proceed to propose a vision of the future of ABC whereby eGates are replaced with a no-stopping multimodal biometrics identification system fully taking into account privacy and security issues. In this context, the just-completed EC PROTECT project will be presented including the innovative use cases developed, an overview of the technical solutions, legal and ethical aspects, and outcomes of the demonstrations held.

Prof. Ferryman is a computer scientist and leads the Computational Vision Group within the Department of Computer Science, School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences (SMPCS), University of Reading. His current research interests include multimodal biometrics, automated video surveillance and benchmarking. He is the author of more than 100 scientific publications. He has participated in a wide range of UK and EU funded research programmes including, under border security, the EU EFFISEC project (FP7-217991) on efficient integrated security checkpoints, the EU IPATCH project (FP7-60756on automated surveillance and decision support system for detection and classification of piracy threats to shipping, and the EU FastPass project (FP7-312583) on development of a harmonised modular reference system for all European automated crossing points, the latter of which he led the largest technological workstream on traveller identification and monitoring. Prof. Ferryman coordinated the EU PROTECT project (H2020-700259, 2016-2019) on exploration of current and future use of biometrics in border security. Prof. Ferryman is a member of the British Computer Society and has acted as the Director of both the British Machine Vision Association and the Security Information Technology Consortium. Since 2000, he has been a Co-Chair of the IEEE International Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance.