Passports Face The Future
Sun Herald
Sunday May 23, 2004
IF you get a new passport from the second half of 2005 your face will be transformed into a template of digital measurements, moulded into an algorithm and transferred to a computer chip.
The chip with your digitised facial measurements will then be embedded into a plastic credit card-sized cover and sealed into your new Australian biometric passport.
This is the future of personal identification, and Australia is leading the way.
Machines read faces better than people, say the experts, and the friendly passport controller checking your passport as you enter Australia will very soon be replaced by a camera and a computer screen.
You simply lay your new passport down on a screen. It reads the chip which contains all the digitised measurements of your face. The computer has stored about 80 measurements of your face such as forehead to chin, gap between eyes, eyes to ears, nose to mouth and width of lips.
Then the computer compares the measurements of your face it has in its memory bank with the image of the person standing in front of the camera. The system needs about 14 of these to make a match. If the computer's measurements match up, you walk straight through. If not, alarms go off.
Tests are already under way and the first computer chip passports will be issued sometime in the second half of next year.
The Government allocated $2.2 million in the budget to test a prototype as part of a $9.7 million project. Biometric passports will target criminals and terrorists who use false passports. Since the beginning of this year, passport control has found 28 cases of data substitution, 18 people have been caught using other people's passports and there have been 38 cases of fraudulently using another identity.
Bob Nash, assistant secretary of the passport branch in the Department of Foreign Affairs, said computer facial technology is 98 per cent accurate, compared to 60 per cent for human visual inspections.
``Biometrics are the unique features of an individual that can be measured and captured on computer disc and used to identify that person," he said.
``They include DNA, fingerprints, eye retina recognition, and facial recognition. Fingerprints are unpopular, as they are mostly associated with criminal activity, but facial recognition is unobtrusive."
Mr Nash said the Government was dealing with two facial recognition companies, Cognitec of Germany and Identix of the US, to adapt the technology to passports.
He said: ``It will take a long time before computer chips replace all the information currently in the front of the passport as many countries won't be able to afford the technology.
``But ultimately a passport could become a credit card-sized card with all the information, including the photo, stored on the chip."
Mr Nash said the new biometric passports won't be used as a de facto Australia ID card as the Government would not allow anyone else to have the technology to read the cards.
He said the machinery costs millions of dollars and there will be a secret access code to read the chip.
A successful facial recognition trial called Smartgate has been operating at Sydney Airport for 18 months. Qantas cabin crew put their regular passport on a scanner in front of a camera, the computer calls up the image of that person from its memory bank and then compares it to the person standing in front of the camera.
The process takes 17 seconds. The trial will soon expand to a second airport and to the first people issued with prototype biometric passports.
PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION GOES HIGH-TECH
1 Computer maps and stores about 80 measurements of face such as forehead to chin,
2 Information is stored on computer chip placed in passport.
3 Computer compares measurements it has in memory bank with image of the person in front of the camera.
System needs about 14 to make a match.
ID ACCURACY
Computer facial technology 98%
Human visual Inspections 60%
© 2004 Sun Herald