Facial recognition technology has drastically improved the ability of the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) to catch would-be fraudsters. Deployed earlier this year, the system has led to a 860 percent increase in fraud detection.
The biometric system is used at Motor Vehicle Division offices and other authorized facilities at which citizens can apply for state ID cards and driver’s licences. Essentially, it matches the faces in new photos to any that might already be in a database, ensuring that one person can’t fraudulently attain multiple ID cards or attempt identity theft. Before, when this kind of work was done by human eyes, only about 33 cases of potential fraud were caught each month, but the biometric system has been finding about 320 per month. (These aren’t all cases of potential fraud, as in many cases the detected issues are the result of mistakes made by applications; but in most cases they were referred to the ADOT Office of the Inspector General for further investigation.)
Part of the reason the technology was adopted was to help enable the ADOT to develop ID cards compliant with requirements laid out in the Department of Homeland Security’s REAL ID regulations, but the system has clearly proven valuable in its own right. Similar results were recently reported from Ireland, where a facial recognition system has really helped to cut down on welfare fraud. As such citizen authentication programs continue to produce such results around the world, more government agencies are likely to take notice and seek out the technology themselves.
Source: The Arizona Republic
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July 24, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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