Red Hat Tech Supports NEC’s Biometric Screening System at Norita Airport

NEC is leveraging Red Hat’s OpenShift solution to build its own One ID passenger management system for Japan’s Narita International Airport. One ID is a biometric identity system that will use facial recognition to streamline the passenger experience.  

With One ID, passengers will register their face at a service desk or a self-service kiosk when they first arrive at the airport. After that, they will be able to pass through security checkpoints and board their plane without ever needing to hand their boarding pass or travel documents to an attendant. Instead, their identity will be confirmed with a facial recognition scan that matches their face to the photo they registered when they checked in.

Red Hat, meanwhile, is an open source specialist. NEC selected OpenShift because the platform has the flexibility and the scalability needed to handle the passenger spikes that can come during peak travel times at a major international airport. OpenShift can be integrated with NEC’s existing hardware and software, and comes as a cloud-native architecture package. 

“Next-generation technologies must be built on a platform that can deliver stable, production-ready innovation,” said Red Hat Cloud Platforms SVP Ashesh Badani.

“By combining NEC’s biometric scanning technology with Red Hat’s OpenShift, we have built an agile and highly scalable platform for the future utilizing open, robust and flexible container services,” added NEC SVP Toshifumi Yoshizaki. “In the future, we will promote the deployment of this solution at airports in Japan, internationally and throughout a wide variety of industries.”

NEC is planning to launch One ID at Narita’s first and second terminals sometime in the near future. It will then expand to other airports in other parts of the world.

NEC first agreed to provide facial recognition technology for Narita Airport back in 2018, and installed the biometric eGates at the beginning of 2019. The company has since delivered facial recognition tech for other Japanese airports, and agreed to provide face and thermal screening tech for airports in Hawaii. It has also partnered with SITA to improve its contactless capabilities.

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August 20, 2020 – by Eric Weiss