Hitachi and Tobu Railway have developed a walk-through facial recognition ticket gate system that retrofits Japan’s main existing rail gates rather than replacing them, and will switch it on at Tokyo’s Ikebukuro Station on July 15.
The system runs on SAKULaLa, the biometric authentication service the two companies have operated since April 2024, and works by adding facial recognition cameras to installed gates and connecting them to the network. Through partnerships with OMRON Social Solutions, Nippon Signal, Toshiba, and Panasonic Connect, it supports ticket gates from OMRON, Nippon Signal, and Toshiba, the country’s three major gate manufacturers, which the companies say could make it usable by many railway operators across Japan without new gate hardware. Ikebukuro, on the Tobu Tojo Line, handles about 420,000 passengers a day and is the first deployment in Tokyo.
The design pairs Panasonic Connect’s facial recognition with Hitachi’s public biometric infrastructure, or PBI, which encrypts enrolled biometric data into a form that cannot be restored to the original face image, aiming to keep templates secure while delivering the matching speed a station gate demands. SAKULaLa manages member information centrally, so a railway operator can offer face-based gate entry without holding personal information or biometric data itself. The service had more than 20,000 registered users as of July.
Face-based ticketing has been building in Japanese rail for several years, since an early face-based railway ticketing system went live in the country, and Keisei Railway brought face-based ticketing to its Tokyo-Narita airport trains. Tobu’s own rollout began with tablet-based checks across 12 stations between Tobu-Utsunomiya and Tochigi in November, followed by walk-through gates at Tobu-Utsunomiya Station in May.
Tobu plans walk-through gates at Kami-Itabashi Station from July 15 and at Funabashi and Magomezawa stations by September, along with gates that work alongside IC transit cards on some lines during the current fiscal year. From fiscal 2027, the companies aim to expand across Tobu lines and to other railway operators, and they intend to extend SAKULaLa to payments at surrounding shops and restaurants, including Tobu Department Store, linking gate access, payment, and identity verification on one platform.
Sources: IBTimes JP
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
