Thales Recommends Use of Facial Recognition to Enforce Social Distancing

Thales is urging venue operators to exercise caution as they start to reopen in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company notes that safety measures like social distancing still need to be enforced as part of the new normal to protect the health of customers and employees.

With that in mind, Thales is advocating for the use of facial recognition to help manage crowds and the flow of people in public-facing establishments. The technology can count the number of people entering a given venue, and send a notification to administrators if the count exceeds the safe, socially distant capacity for that location. Facial recognition can also be used to ensure that people in the venue are wearing masks, and paired with temperature detection systems to make sure that people do not have symptoms of COVID-19 when they enter the building.

On that front, Thales did take the opportunity to promote its own Face Recognition Platform, which can be run through the cloud and accessed from a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone to give venue operators more flexibility and improve response times if an incident does occur. Thales highlighted the Platform’s border control applications, and stressed that it is already being used in contactless boarding procedures at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport.

The FRP platform is compliant with the latest GDPR regulations. Thales has previously argued that the same video analytic technology will help the railway industry protect its passengers during the pandemic.

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June 24, 2020 – by Eric Weiss