TAMPA, Fla.–The Vancouver Port Authority’s use of back-of-the-hand vascular scanning devices integrated with smart card readers for access control in select areas is going well and is meeting the needs of all of its users, including corporate staff and longshoremen, the design engineer for an integrated security project at the port, says at the Biometrics Consortium Conference here last week.
The scanning devices, called the VP-II, are supplied by Identica Corp., which has also supplied the scanners for access control at the Canada’s Port of Halifax (TR2, Sept. 5, 2007).
In Vancouver the port looked at using fingerprint readers but that technology met resistance from corporate staff and longshoremen who associated the technology with a criminal element, says Shawn O’Neil, a design engineer with PBA Engineering, Ltd., a business unit of ICx Technologies [ICXT]. The port also tried hand geometry readers but they had too many false negative readings, he said.
In the end the port went with the vascular recognition technology for a variety of reasons, O’Neil said. One is that the readers require minimal touching. A person puts their hand under the VP-II, which quickly scans the vascular pattern for a quick comparison against a database of vascular patterns for people who have access to certain areas of the port.
The VP-II has demonstrated a high true-positive rate and high-throughput, and it works with wet and greasy hands, O’Neil says. For scanners installed outdoors, the devices are equipped with a weather shield that is also working fine, he says.
About the only problem with the scanners has been where some of them have had to be positioned on walls do to the existing wiring in the various facilities, which has meant installing them either a little low or high, making it a bit awkward for some people to put their hands under the devices, O’Neil says. Still that never proved to be a showstopper and it takes people about 15 tries with the technology for it to become second nature, he says. O’Neill says he doesn’t get phone calls anymore from port employees having trouble using the scanners.
The Port of Vancouver has nearly 50 of the scanners deployed for access to secure areas by 200 credentialed users.
“It has become protocol,” O’Neill says of the scanner use.
Earlier this year The Port of Vancouver and the Fraser River Port Authority merged to become the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority. O’Neill said that with the merger, there is the potential for the use of the VP-II scanners to increase dramatically for access control throughout the port.
The VP-II is based on technology developed by South Korea’s Techsphere. The system is widely used in Asia.
Identica is working on introducing the technology into the U.S. and says it will be deployed at two seaports as part of upcoming demonstrations of biometric reader technology for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program. While port workers enrolled in the TWIC program submit their fingerprints to be vetted against a terrorist and criminal watchlists, ports will be able to use other biometrics for access control.
The VP-II readers will be used at the Ports of Long Beach and New York/New Jersey, Ayal Vogel, executive vice president for Global Sales at Identica, tells TR2. The use of the VP-II’s will not be in place of fingerprint-enabled smart card readers that will be used for upcoming TWIC card reader pilot projects, he says.
The Transportation Security Administration is looking at the VP-II readers as part of its Initial Capabilities Evaluation for TWIC.
In addition to Long Beach and New York/New Jersey, the Georgia Ports Authority, which has four facilities spread out over 80 miles, plans to pilot test the VP-II readers, Vogel says. The VP-IIs can communicate over Ethernet or Internet Protocol connections so that port workers can be enrolled remotely, he says.
Separately, Identica says it has created a new technology for its vascular readers that will allow a vascular template to be stored on a FIPS 201 smart card without compromising any existing information on the card. That means the company’s readers could eventually be considered for access control under the HSPD-12 guidance.