Originally Posted by
Murphy123
OP, I asked this exact question when I renewed my passport 2 years ago - for a 10 year one. I asked because based on my then current age I fully expected a major decline in appearance in 10 years - nothing to do with weight loss etc.
I was told that the new Canadian 10 year passports use data points on a person's face. Whether this is true or not I do not know but I am hoping it is. However, it was very good news for the people behind me who had multi-coloured hair - as in yellow, pink and blue. My husband asked the same question when he renewed his passport last year and was told the same.
New York State cited this as one of the benefits of going from color drivers license photos to black and white photos (main was a security benefit that it was laser etched polycarbonate, secondary benefit was that people checking the ID got less fixated on hair color changes)
As far as the appearance thing I generally use NEXUS (iris scan, human being never checks the document), and for airline personnel/security checklines I generally use my US passport... I will say that the photo on my Canadian passport is pretty unfocused and grainy, would hide a lot of appearance changes in terms of skin/wrinkles. I thought it might just be a print quality issue on the passport paper itself, and I got an Android app to read the photo off the ePassport chip... it's just a bad scan of the photo (photo digitally stored on the chip is grainy too - the actual scan of the photo makes it pretty clear that there was dust on whatever scanner glass scanned in the passport photo I provided).
No idea if they actually do any facial recognition based off the photo at Canadian points of entry though... Theoretically, you could run any ePassport through facial recognition software, and that is generally designed to account for age/appearance changes.