DULLES, Va.–The authority that oversees Dulles International and Reagan National airports near Washington, D.C., on Thursday unveiled its own design of a facial recognition system that it will deploy to both airports this fall to meet a government mandate that all foreign nationals departing the U.S. have their biometrics checked to help ensure they are leaving the country in accordance with their visas.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority’s (MWAA) veriScan system captures a facial photo of all travelers at the boarding gate of international flights just before they make for the jetway to board the aircraft. Once the photo is captured, an encrypted file is then delivered to a Customs and Border Protection database, called the Traveler Verification Service (TVS), that contains the photos of all passengers booked for a particular flight, and if a match is generated, the traveler is cleared to enter the jetway.

Demonstration unit of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority's veriScan camera system. Photo: Calvin Biesecker
Demonstration unit of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority’s veriScan camera system. Photo: Calvin Biesecker

Photos of travelers are captured as they are moving toward the camera, with the entire process of capture, matching and clearance taking less than two seconds per person, a MWAA official told Defense Daily.

CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during a presentation at Dulles for media, government, airline, airport and other stakeholders that match rates are in the 98 to 99 percent rate regardless of race or gender.

For the Dulles and Reagan deployments, veriScan will be donated to all airlines with international flights, which amounts to about 71 flights daily at Dulles and between 11 and 13 at Reagan. Operations and maintenance of the systems will be the responsibility of the airlines. The MWAA official said it takes 30 minutes to train a gate agent on how to use the system.

The business model that MWAA is using for veriScan is unique so far in that with the system developed in house using commercial off-the-shelf technology, the costs are low. The camera application is on an Apple [AAPL] iPad, and combined with proprietary software for encrypting the photo and sending it to CBP and the inhouse staff talent, veriScan is about one-tenth the cost of other biometric exit systems being priced, the MWAA official said.

Jack Potter, MWAA’s president and CEO, told Defense Daily after the presentations that after hearing the proposed costs to deploy facial recognition technology at each international departure gate, he directed his technical staff to develop the in-house solution. He said veriScan was developed in just over a month and was ready to begin testing in mid-July.

After about 45 days of testing, MWAA now hopes veriScan will be deployed to all of its international airlines by Nov. 1, although Potter told attendees that the pace of the rollout will depend on the airlines.

Potter said that MWAA is interested in selling veriScan to other airports and and relevant stakeholders.

Congress mandated that biometrics be used to verify the entry and exit of all foreign nationals arriving to and departing from the U.S. as a way to better identify these individuals and to ensure they aren’t known or suspected terrorists. CBP has been using fingerprints for around 15 years to record the entry of foreign national into the U.S., and is now also adding facial recognition to the arrival process as a way to speed up the entry. McAleenan said that using facial recognition to identify people before they reach a CBP station, has sped up processing to one or two minutes per person versus upward of 10 where the technology isn’t being used.

The former Obama administration in early 2016 directed CBP to begin moving out with testing and deployment of biometrics for exit after the agency had sorted out the best path forward, which was using facial recognition at the boarding gate. President Trump as ordered the exit implementation be accelerated.

For now, at Dulles and Reagan, the photo taken by veriScan and matched through the TVS serves as a traveler’s identity document but they still have to present their boarding pass. In the near future, working with the airlines, Potter said the hope is for the facial recognition process to take the place of both the travel document and boarding pass, which will further speed the boarding process.

Still, Potter said that passengers for a flight aboard an Airbus A380 jumbo jet, which can hold well over 300 passengers, boarded in 23 minutes using the current two-step process with veriScan.

Some airlines are already evaluating facial recognition technology to meet the biometric exit mandate and serve as a traveler’s boarding pass.

In addition to Dulles and Reagan, Orlando International Airport in Florida and Norm Mineta San Jose International Airport in California this year have also begun the deployment of facial recognition technology to meet the biometric exit mandate. Orlando and San Jose are using system integrators for their deployments.

McAleenan said there are currently seven letter commitments from the top 25 airports in terms of international flights that are signed up to move forward with biometric exit. He also said discussions are underway with nine of the top 10 airports.

“It’s a rapidly developing adoption of this approach,” McAleenan said.

CBP is vendor neutral toward the camera technology and related needs, McAleenan said. CBP sets the technical standards and, if these are met, the agency can take care of the matching, he said.

John Wagner, deputy executive Assistant Commissioner for CBP’s Office of Field Operations, said that images of U.S. citizens that are obtained at the boarding gates are erased and deleted within 12 hours. New photos of foreign nationals are sent to the Department of Homeland Security’s authoritative biometric database, called IDENT, he said.

McAleenan noted that CBP is working with the Transportation Security Administration to evaluate facial recognition technology at airport security checkpoints. CBP is also evaluating using facial recognition to verify the identities of pedestrians entering and exiting the U.S. and is examining the technology for identifying passengers inside vehicles at ports of entry.