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Let me see your face

The electronic passport is coming. Beginning in November, new travel documents being issued will include biometric data such as information about the shape of the holder’s face. German researchers are examining the effectiveness of face-recognition technology and were on hand at CeBIT – the international computer fair – to present their results.

“Your travel documents, please, then give us a nice smile for the camera!” is something travellers might soon hear at international borders. That is because passports will contain a chip that includes stored data on facial shape, the iris of the eye or fingerprints. The data is transmitted to a computer wirelessly – if the information matches, the traveller can pass through the checkpoint without further ado. This process will make passport control faster and more secure. In Germany, the first passports with biometric data will be issued in November. The reason for such quick introduction: European Union citizens will only be able to travel to the US without a visa if they can present a passport with biometric data.

“Initially, the new passports will include two-dimensional digital photos of the holder’s face,” explained Dr Cristoph Busch, head of the Security Technology for Graphics and Communications Systems Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (IGD), in Darmstadt, Germany. This is to be the first step towards introdu-cing biometric passports. In addition to the photograph, encrypted data on the passport holder’s facial shape will be stored. Later, encrypted fingerprint data will also be enclosed. But just how effective is 2-D face recognition? Working under contract to the Federal Office for Information Security, researchers at IGD sought to answer this question. In a study entitled ‘Analyses of the Characteristics of Face Recognition Systems – Bioface’, the scientists tested various techniques and recognition algorithms. They also examined whether hats, facial expressions, head pose or incidental light can impair the effectiveness of the recognition process. The result: significant incidental lighting and turning or inclining the head can, indeed, make proper identification difficult.

“A higher degree of security could be provided by 3-D face recognition,” explains Busch. The advantage of using this method is that the facial models recorded are always metrically correct. Basic head measurements, such as distance between the eyes or length of the nose, remain the same, regardless of the distance between the person being photo-graphed and the camera. To capture a face in 3-D, one approach involves projecting a colour stripe pattern onto the subject’s head. The forehead, nose or chin distort the colour stripes, producing a different characteristic pattern for each person.The operation of the 3-D face-recognition system is largely unaffected by disruptive factors like lighting and head pose. This makes the process more secure and more stable than 2-D face recognition. The IGD researchers are currently testing the effectiveness of a variety of 3-D systems.

Travelling with a smart passport Setec, a Finnish smart-card and security-printing company, was the first in the world to combine visual recognition and smart-card technology in a passport. The combination of a polycarbonate-based data page and chip-operating system created a new-era ultrasecure passport that is almost impossible to forge.

Ultrasecure high-tech passport The development of the passport has traditionally been a race against counterfeiters and forgers. The rapid growth of international tourism, the demand that travelling should be free of aggravation and security aspects are a continuing challenge to passport technology. The biometric passport looks like the old familiar passport, but it includes, in practice, a com-puter and antenna. New technology is placed inside the data page, which is made of the polycarbonate plastic that is familiar in the present passports.

Biometric recognition is based on technology which can identify a person by measuring some in- dividual physical or biological feature, such as the shape of a face, a fingerprint or an iris. The biometric information given by the meas-uring equipment, such as a camera or fingerprint feeler, is converted into mathematical data that is recorded in a microprocessor chip.

“This is a real high-tech passport. When the biometric identifier in the microprocessor chip is incorporated into the present passport, forging is almost impossible,” says president and CEO Pekka Eloholma.


	E-mail the article: Published: 2005/06/03

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