Vix Vizion Biometric System Approved for Use in South Australia Casinos

Vix Vizion’s Imagus facial recognition system has been approved for use in gaming establishments in South Australia. The state currently requires that any licensed establishment with thirty or more gaming machines use facial recognition to monitor the players using those machines if at least one of them has the ability to accept bank notes.

Now that it has been approved, those establishments can use Imagus to comply with law. The certification was granted by South Australia’s Consumer and Business Services (CBS) department, which evaluates each solution to make sure that it fulfills the necessary criteria.

To receive clearance, a facial recognition solution needs to be able to identify gamblers in video footage captured at a venue. The system itself must also be compatible with a CBS database of people who are barred from playing. If it does spot a blacklisted player, the system needs to be able to send a notification to the establishment so venue operators can respond accordingly.

The South Australia law was designed to create an official register of people using gaming machines. Given the scope of the program, the Australian-owned Vix Vizion needed to demonstrate that its technology meets the latest data privacy regulations, and that unauthorized individuals cannot gain access to its database.

“Our Imagus software only holds the metadata on an individual, rather than actual data. In other words, it stores the data about the data, rather than the data itself,” said Vix Vizion Product and Channel Manager Fraser Larcombe. “Therefore, an individual will only be recognised if they have already been placed on the barring database.”

The government of South Australia recently indicated that that it is planning to use a facial recognition app to monitor people in quarantine, though the country’s privacy commissioner has warned that the use of facial recognition should be limited until there is stronger privacy legislation. Facial recognition is already being used to identify players in gambling establishments all over the world, including the Star Casino in Sydney, where operators installed a system after a player tried to smuggle a $5,000 chip out of the building in a sock.   

Source: IT Brief

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November 6, 2020 – by Eric Weiss