Innovation in LAX: Facial Recognition in Boarding Process by Gemalto

If you have been watching the news lately, maybe you may have noticed that one of the industries that is experiencing the biggest tech disruptions is transportation. Billions of dollars are being invested in this sector in order to innovate and meet the society’s new standards when it comes to moving around and doing it in an efficient fashion.

Travelers that use air transportation through commercial airports are expected to double in the next 20 years. This means that the number of passengers may go up to 7.8 billion every year. This volume can be dreading for agents in the sector, especially if we pay attention to how major airports are currently operating.

With this in mind, some airports worldwide are making their moves to prepare themselves. That’s why LAX will be launching a face recognition trial coordinated by Gemalto, a high-tech company that is dedicated to this innovative technology.

Terminal 4 Will Be the Place

Gemalto will be running the trial on terminal 4 of the LAX during the following months. The pilot test will depend on a major airline but further information on this point hasn’t been disclosed yet.

Passengers will arrive at the boarding gate and a computer will process the facial recognition software with the aim to minimize the time and infrastructure needed to confirm the ID and approve the boarding. And if you are wondering about the accuracy of this technology, the Department of Homeland Security tested Gemalto’s development during the 2018 Biometric Technology Rally, scoring a 99.44% successful acquisition rate in less than five seconds.

Law Compliance

Of course, public agencies will oversee the trials in order to make sure that everything is compliant to the law. Those who are skeptic about the use of these technologies by private corporations may find some comfort in that this pilot test will be heavily supervised by the authorities and it will not operate independently nor replacing any of current security processes at the boarding gate.

The idea, of course, is to minimize the infrastructure needed to handle passengers before boarding the planes. The human factor tends to maximize the time needed for clearance, which will become a more severe problem in the near future. At the same pace as the number of travelers grows, the logistic and security problems in airports multiply.

Agents in airports need to rely on new technologies to become exponentially more efficient and innovations as the one that will be tested by Gemalto are one way to achieve it. However, it will not be possible to fully implement such technologies without full compliance of the law and the possibility to say that these mechanisms are completely reliable, mainly in terms of security.

The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection are heavily involved in these pilot tests and will oversee the full process in order to determine if this technology is apt to be implemented in the near future. And with the fast-growing number of passengers, LAX is the perfect hub to conduct such tests.