Biometric self-boarding systems to chip in at Bengaluru airport

Facial Recognition Technology

Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport is all set to introduce a biometric check-in system, the fully paperless boarding system which will suffice to facilitate a seamless journey through the airport.

Indian flyers will soon find shorter queues and have a seamless journey without obstacles or hassles from stepping into the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) up to the boarding point.

Initially, domestic passengers of SpiceJet, Jet Airways and Air Asia will stand to benefit, one will have to log on to the Digi Yatra portal, and provide government-issued identification documents such as the Aadhar card. A unique ID will be assigned to the passenger’s biometric information generated for this purpose and will be the referral ID while booking tickets. A snap of the passenger’s face will be captured using biometric technology which will be the pass for all the way to the boarding gate.

Replacing the airport security, Vision-Box’s state-of-the-art biometric scanners will automatically scan passenger’s face and permit passage throughout. The referral ID number needs to be obtained just once and not for every journey.

Facial-Check-ins

This follows an agreement signed in Portugal on October 4, 2018, between Hari Marar, CEO of Bangalore International Airport Limited, which operates KIA, and Miguel Litman, CEO of Vision Box, a global player in electronic identity solutions, said an official release.

Vision-Box CEO Miguel Leitmann said, “This is the first end-to-end face recognition-based walk-through experience in Asia and the largest in the world. It is also one of the most significant steps towards the Digital India campaign endorsed by the government”

The technology will be rolled out at Bengaluru and Hyderabad airports in February 2019 in a bid to help congested airports deal with rapidly rising passenger numbers. It will then be installed at airports in Kolkata, Varanasi, Pune and Vijayawada by April 2019.

To begin with, only the domestic passengers can benefit from this technology and will be adopted for international passengers after the Immigration Department allows it in future. The regular security clearance checks will be carried out till the technology is widely adopted by the passengers. Special counters will serve the passengers who are not interested to go through the digital process.

Airport’s at it already

While airports across the world are in a marathon to adopt the biometric and face-scanning system to accelerate their processes, Changi airport, Singapore is already using facial recognition for self-service check-in options as well as bag drop, immigration and boarding at their newest terminal T4.

“We have lots of reports of lost passengers, so one possible use we can think of is, we need to detect and find people who are on the flight. Of course, with permission from the airlines,” Steve Lee, Changi Airport Group’s chief information officer, told Reuters.

In addition to this, the technology comes in handy to spot passengers who have missed the last boarding call of their flight.

Changi airport is also planning to implement the facial recognition technology in its three other terminals at bag drop and immigration as well as in terminal five which is expected to be up and running in the next 10 years.

British Airways also recently installed biometric technology to identify customers at airports in New York, Orlando, and Miami, while Australia is looking to replace passports with biometric scans by 2020.