Thread: UK: Face recognition robot tests at immigration

Face recognition robot tests at immigration
Manchester airport is trialling the new machines that could cut queues, but airport workers may strike
Chris Haslam

Fly into Manchester airport any time over the next six months and you could be invited to take part in a Home Office trial. Tucked away in a corner of Terminal 1’s immigration hall are five brushed-steel-and-glass facial-recognition gates, and they’re the future of immigration.

The Home Office has decided that passport checks by human employees of the UK Border Agency (UKBA) are old-fashioned and inefficient, and what we really need is intricate equipment and complicated software to do the same job.

Never mind the government’s track record with technology, think about the cost savings: a single UKBA employee can supervise five or more facial-recognition gates from a central-monitoring station, thus freeing fellow passport-checkers for other duties, such as shelf-stacking at Tesco (unions last week promised to strike in response to the new technology).

What is important to the public, though, is cutting the time we spend queuing at immigration, so we can spend more time waiting at the luggage carousel. The new technology promises to do just that, but only if you hold an e-passport - the new one with the biometric data stored on a chip.

Only 12.6m Britons have these, so the facial-recognition option is not available for 80% of us - including the home secretary, Jacqui Smith - although that number will decrease as new passports are issued. You must also be over 18.

I passed that test, so I became one of the guinea pigs last week. It works like this. First, I approach a glass gate, where a screen displaying a silent animation - cleverly designed to explain the procedure to all nationalities - instructs me to slide my passport into a slot.

The technology presupposes that since I’m not a child and I’ve somehow succeeded in acquiring an e-passport, I must, therefore, be mentally competent to follow these instructions. So there’s no animation explaining “Lengthways, not widthways, Dummkopfâ€

Great the UK is doing something so proactive, while we Americans have had to remove our shoes, not carry any liquids or even manicure scissors. Although I know things have improved for the traveller since those days, amazing that this technology in the UK is provided by Fujitsu, a Japanese company from the last I heard.