Eurostar to Enable Biometric Boarding for UK Passengers

The Eurostar rail line between the UK and France is expanding passengers’ opportunities to take advantage of biometric processing, thanks to a new partnership with iProov.

The service is being facilitated via iProov’s biometric mobile authentication technology, which is designed to match a user’s face against the image on their identity document. The technology is being integrated into the Eurostar app, with the aim of letting passengers boarding in London to bypass traditional ticket and border checks, enabling a contactless boarding process at the St Pancras railway station.

The collaboration is the result of the “First of a Kind” competition organized by Innovate UK and the UK Department of Transport. Commenting on the winning projects coming out of the competition, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that they’re broadly aimed at supporting “better, more environmentally friendly journeys” in which passengers experience “a more efficient, reliable and responsive railway”.

Eurostar has previously explored the use of biometric passenger processing in collaboration with authorities on the other side of the Channel: a 2017 project undertaken in collaboration with the French Ministry of Interior leveraged facial recognition technology from Vision-Box to match passengers to their passports.

For its part, in announcing the Eurostar project iProov highlighted its solution’s use of sophisticated liveness detection technology designed to ensure that the end user isn’t trying to fool the authentication system with a mask, photo, or other means of spoofing.

The company will be working with Eurostar as well as WorldReach Software, a Canadian travel and immigration solutions specialist, to develop the biometric solution over the next several months. The organizations are aiming to get the system up and running in March of 2021.

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June 18, 2020 – by Alex Perala