Singapore’s Changi Airport is on a course for multi-modal biometric screening, reports The Straits Times.
The airport already uses fingerprint-based passenger identification, but will soon introduce facial and iris scanning. Such biometric scans will be enabled through Terminal 4, or “T4”, which is scheduled to open toward the end of this year, and will employ what has been dubbed the Fast and Seamless Travel, or FAST, screening program.
The Straits Times reports that the new biometric modalities “will not all be immediately activated” at the time of T4’s opening, but that eventually they will come to all traveler screening checkpoints in a roll-out process that the Senior Minister of State for Home Affairs anticipates will take around two years. The country’s Immigration and Checkpoints Authority is going to start collecting the iris biometric data of citizens and permanent residents applying for passports and ID cards, and is also considering checking travelers’ documentation against Interpol databases.
At the end of last year, Safran provided an update on its contribution to this project, asserting that its facial recognition technology would be used at Changi and that the system would be operational in the second half of this year. It isn’t yet clear if Safran is also providing the iris scanning technology, or if that component will come from another vendor.
Source: The Straits Times
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March 13, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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