Chipping Away At Terrorism
Chipping Away At Terrorism
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is planning to roll out a brand new biometric passport scheme for passengers as part of its mission to identify and filter out criminals and terrorists who travel under false identities. Rodney Appleyard reports.
The Department has gained inspiration from the recent success of the Qantus SmartGate Biometric trial, initiated by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and Passport Australia.
The Biometric technology being used by DFAT is revolutionary and could only be made after funding was increased worldwide for the purpose of improving border control security after September 11th. The Department has received money since July 2002, under the federal budget, to research and develop identity verification systems using facial recognition inside passports.
Providing the scheme passes top level approval, all new passports will contain a digital image of the holder's face stored on a microchip, containing mathematical algorithms. So every time somebody applies for a new one, or passes through customs, that person's face will be matched with the microchip in their passport. DFAT hopes that this system will be successful for improving the security of the passport issuing process in Australia.
Initially, the process will focus on providing better security for Australians travelling overseas and visitors from other countries will not be required to carry a chip in their passport when they enter the country. However, many nations worldwide are interested in introducing this chip system too, so similar schemes might become universal very quickly.
The process
Once an Australian passenger who has their passport chip installed passes through customs, they will be required to face a camera for verification. Standing two feet away, each person will have their features matched up with the microchip. A verification decision should be made after five seconds. The passenger might be asked to blink, smile or move in a way that is human to prevent a fake facial feature or mole from deceiving the system.
If the computer finds a fault in the match, the surveillance operating system will send a silent alarm to alert an officer that the person should be questioned. The computer should be capable of identifying a passport holder even if that person changes hairstyle, grows a beard or wears glasses.
This facial technology is considered to be the most natural and non-intrusive way to identify a person.
Terry Hartmann, the Passport Information Technology Officer for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the manager of this project, outlines how the Australian government became a world leader in this area.
"We started this project just as a normal biometrics programme in June 2001. But then after September 11th, the need and urgency was far greater for this type of technology to be integrated. The technology is much more accurate than it was five years ago because of this fresh injection of extra money. Facial recognition is now more viable than it was, so we can compare people much more successfully than we ever could before. As a result of these efforts, we have managed to increase performance by quite a few leaps in the last few years.
"The areas of the face we focus on to define differences include: the distance between the eyes; the width of the nose; depth of eye sockets; and the structure of cheekbones, jaw line and chin. These are all considered to be nodal points, which are measured to create a numerical code-a string of numbers that represents the face in the database. We can usually notice a large degree in difference between the image on the camera and the microchip/photograph on the passport. The computer identifies the dissimilarities."
It is hoped that this system will also help Australia deal much more quickly and accurately with increased numbers of international passengers who are due to pass through Australia in coming years. In 2000-2001, there were about 17.9 million people who passed in and out of Australia. Australian Customs say that passenger loads in Australia will double in 10 years.
The Government plans to have this system implemented by October 2004, ahead of the U.S. deadline for facial recognition chips to be inserted into all new passports holders who wish to enter the States.
Preventing terrorism
Hartmann believes that this new biometric system will have a significantly positive influence on worldwide security.
"When you think about the degrees to which people can change their appearance over a couple of years, it is quite difficult for a human border control officer to detect those kinds of changes. They might have different eye-colouring, new facial hair or no facial hair. All of these are distractions from identifying the photo in the passport. A person a few years ago may not look like the same person standing in front of you. And if they are from a different ethnic group which the officer is not familiar with, then it becomes even more difficult, because you will not be so familiar with the racial trends of different people. An impostor could possibly travel on another person's passports to get into a country when they are not entitled to do so, so this system is very necessary to increase the quality of security in Australia."
Smartgate success sets benchmark
A trial has been conducted for the last year with pilots from Qantas, so that they could keep track of which crew members were originally enrolled, based upon each passport holder being matched with the image in the database (this system is different from DFAT's tests because it does not include a biometric chip inside the passport). The idea is to prevent hoax flyers infiltrating the flight network, such as the terrorists who struck the Twin Towers in New York. So far it has been very successful. Each person's photograph is taken from four different angles to provide the best possible results.
This world first customs system is called SmartGate and was installed at the customs control point for Qantas aircrew at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport. In less than ten seconds SmartGate performs all necessary image verification and customs/immigration checks, allowing enrolled aircrew to pass through customs quickly, while maintaining a high level of security. It was introduced in partnership with the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs and Passports Australia on 26 November, 2002. Up until February this year, 4,400 crew were enrolled, and 84,000 transactions were made. They tested the Cognetic Systems' FaceVACS software, which has proved to be consistent across a range of variables, including ageing, ethnicity, and changes in facial appearance (e.g. glasses/no glasses, facial hair/no facial hair).
An evaluation of transactions has revealed that the system is highly accurate compared to other biometric systems. Only between 1-2 percent of aircrew have been referred to a Customs Officer for manual processing because they did not meet Smartgate's high threshold. Results show that manual processing takes 48 seconds, compared to SmartGate's 17 seconds.
The independent evaluation of the SmartGate project, conducted by Dr Jim Wayman, Director of Biometric Identification Research at the Office of Research and Graduate Studies and College of Engineering, San Jose State University, says there are no technical reasons why SmartGate could not be expanded to other groups and locations.
"SmartGate's performance is remarkably good for an operational facial recognition system. We know of no other face recognition system with documented performance at this level elsewhere in the world."
The results also found that 98 percent of the crew preferred SmartGate to manual methods; over two thirds of eligible crew have now enrolled in SmartGate; faster clearance through customs was the motivation for the crew to enrol and 96 percent of the crew did not express privacy concerns.
With this success in mind, DFAT is very confident that their latest scheme for general passengers will be just as successful. Leon Beddington, spokesperson for the Australian Customs Service, says: "Even if it only becomes usable for Australian passport holders, it's very worthwhile because half the people travelling through our gates are Australian passport holders."
Gail Batman, National Director Border Intelligence and Passengers, says these systems have caught the imagination of the rest of the world too.
"In May 2003, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) announced that it had selected face recognition as the globally interoperable biometric for machine-assessed identity confirmation with Machine Readable Travel Document, following a comprehensive analysis of various available biometrics. This is consistent with current practice and the widespread use of "photo ID" to verify identity during the travel process.
"As a result of this recommendation, the interest in face recognition systems has increased markedly, as border control organisations look to implement such systems. This has led to unexpected international interest in the SmartGate system as a prototype of future ICAO-compliant border crossing systems."
So there is every expectation that the DFAT biometric scheme, which involves inserting a biometric chip photograph into the passport, will be granted government approval to go live and increase security at Australian airports because there is a genuine need for future worldwide security collaboration.
Looking even further into the future, the possibilities for developing this technology appear to be endless, including loading terrorist details into an international database, so that any known terrorist travelling under a false passport can be identified immediately and taken into custody. The U.S. has a photographic database set up at the moment which scans for terrorists who enter the country. The introduction of biometric schemes worldwide-such as DFAT's-could pave the way for a worldwide database being set up in years to come, making it even more difficult for criminals and terrorists to slip through the net.
Related Article: