Now that it has begun a slow rollout of a biometric-based system to verify the departure of travelers from the U.S. on international flights, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is about to begin a pilot test using the same technology to verify the identities of people arriving to the country by air.
The facial recognition technology will automatically identify a person before they arrive at a CBP officer’s inspection booth, allowing the officer to know who the person is, that they have a valid passport without having to see or check it, and begin an inspection of the individual immediately, Kim Mills, director of Entry Transformation within CBP’s Office of Entry/Exit Transformation., tells HSR in an interview.
The first operational test will possibly begin within a month at an airport, Mills says, and initially CBP will use a webcam to take a photo of an individual when he or she arrives at the agency’s booth. The image will be automatically sent to the agency’s Traveler Verification System (TVS), which is stored in a cloud computing environment.
Unisys [UIS] is CBP’s contractor for the TVS system, which houses the photo galleries for the flights that are part of the ongoing evaluations of facial recognition technology for departing international flights. In the case of the biometric exit program, a camera at a departure gate automatically takes a photo of all passengers leaving the U.S. on select daily flights and compares the image with a population of photos in TVS that are gathered from the flight manifests for that day’s international flights that are part of the program.
The plan is to eventually add photo galleries to TVS for all individuals arriving to the U.S. by air.
Currently, foreign nationals visiting the U.S. have their fingerprints checked at a CBP inspection booths in the airport to verify that the person carrying a visa is the same person that received the visa overseas. The captured fingerprints are compared to biometric data stored in the Department of Homeland Security’s IDENT database.
The capture of fingerprints of U.S. citizens upon arrival by air isn’t permitted but just like the current biometric exit evaluations, the plan is to capture face photos of everyone coming to a CBP booth after their international flight lands.
Mills says that the introduction of face recognition checks on entry will eliminate the need for arriving travelers to go to an automated passport control kiosk before waiting in line at a CBP booth because the photo capture will automatically provide the officer with the background information about the person.
“TVS will then return back to the officer who that individual is and will run all the queries as if they had scanned their passport,” she says.
Eliminating the passport scan, which involves reading the electronic ship stored in the document, will save time, Mill says. How much time though is still to be determined as the upcoming operational trials will provide data to quantify the savings, she says.
Eventually, the goal is to have cameras able to capture a photo of a person as he or she is approaching the booth so that by the time they actually are there the officer already has their information displayed on a computer screen, allowing the inspection to begin immediately, Mills says. The testing will help determine the best places to mount cameras for capturing photos as they are approaching a booth, she says.
Mills also hopes that a camera can capture images of all family members arriving at a booth for a quick check against their images in TVS, and the displaying their information for the officer, further expediting the arrival process. Currently, each family member, if they are from another country, has their passports and fingerprints checked separately.
Reengineering of the biometric entry checks is on the fast track. Mills says that the plan is in early 2018 to begin the new primary entry check, which CBP is calling Simplified Arrival.
Simplified Arrival will be more robust, including a new front-end application that potentially is mobile as well as full family capture. Once CBP has enough data from the first few airport trials, it will be in a position to determine an implementation strategy nationwide, Mills says.
For a foreign national, the face recognition capture will also eliminate the need for a passport scan and fingerprint check at the CBP booth. Currently, CBP officers do take photo of arriving foreign nationals at their booth but that is a manual process that will be eliminated with automatic photo capture. The current process takes 45 seconds to a minute just to gather the information from a foreign national and that will be eliminated with the automatic photo capture, Mills says.
Instead, the officer can focus on the inspection of the individual before admitting him or her into the country, she says. She estimates that the entire process for each foreign national could go roughly go from 90 seconds to two minutes down to 15 to 30 seconds “possibly,” not to mention getting to bypass the APC kiosks because the photo capture becomes its own “self-check in.”