It is actually facial recognition, if you looked at your recipt, it had your name, flight number, passport number etc all from taking a picture of your face.
First time I did it at EWR, I was spooked....
Then I thought about it, it isn't like it searched 100 mil faces in 2-3 seconds....it knew I was on XX flt, it knew that flight just landed and there were XX number of GE people on that flight, so, p[retty small group to search from. Even if 3-4 flights land together, still a pretty small pool to search from.