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Jan 14, 02, 7:04 pm
Palm Beach International Airport is going high-tech, both by digitizing background checks it performs on its employees, and by adopting a controversial face-recognition technology aimed at rooting out terrorism suspects.
Airport officials plan to demonstrate for reporters Tuesday a new system for digitizing employee fingerprints. The system is meant to furnish clearance to workers who have unescorted access to secured airport areas such as the airport tarmac, or the ramps leading to planes...
...Likely to be far more controversial is a digital face-recognition system, which will scan the faces of people present at the airport and rapidly compare their images against photos of suspected terrorists stored in an electronic database. If a match is made, an alert will be raised to authorities, De La Rionda said.
The Palm Beach airport facial-scanning system is being built by ACT Systems Integrators of Miami, a hardware developer, and software provider Visionics. The latter is the same company that devised the controversial face-recognition system used at the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., to scan the faces of all game attendees.
The American Civil Liberties Union, among others, have decried the development of facial-scanning technologies, urging airport security officials to consider their limitations before putting them in place as a buffer against terrorism.
John Costanzo, vice president of marketing for ATC Systems Integrators, told Newsbytes that the Palm Beach airport test is likely to begin early next week, and run for 90 days. He said the system being developed for the airport will not rely on images that are scanned into the system's memory. Instead, if the face of an airport passerby does not instantly match the suspects in the database, the photo is immediately discarded.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173636.html
Airport officials plan to demonstrate for reporters Tuesday a new system for digitizing employee fingerprints. The system is meant to furnish clearance to workers who have unescorted access to secured airport areas such as the airport tarmac, or the ramps leading to planes...
...Likely to be far more controversial is a digital face-recognition system, which will scan the faces of people present at the airport and rapidly compare their images against photos of suspected terrorists stored in an electronic database. If a match is made, an alert will be raised to authorities, De La Rionda said.
The Palm Beach airport facial-scanning system is being built by ACT Systems Integrators of Miami, a hardware developer, and software provider Visionics. The latter is the same company that devised the controversial face-recognition system used at the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., to scan the faces of all game attendees.
The American Civil Liberties Union, among others, have decried the development of facial-scanning technologies, urging airport security officials to consider their limitations before putting them in place as a buffer against terrorism.
John Costanzo, vice president of marketing for ATC Systems Integrators, told Newsbytes that the Palm Beach airport test is likely to begin early next week, and run for 90 days. He said the system being developed for the airport will not rely on images that are scanned into the system's memory. Instead, if the face of an airport passerby does not instantly match the suspects in the database, the photo is immediately discarded.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173636.html