The Invention That Can End Airport Immigration Lineups

The system called Seamless Corridor uses artificial intelligence and biometrics to verify the identity of travelers who have just disembarked from the plane. Indonesia’s Directorate General of Immigration has installed three corridors —two at Jakarta airport and one at Surabaya— as part of the All Indonesia initiative, a government program for digital transformation. This process requires a prior procedure. Before flying to Indonesia, travelers share their passport details through the All Indonesia app, a system similar to the US ESTA electronic travel authorization or the European ETIAS. This enables immigration services to conduct background checks before the traveler arrives at the airport.
The technology was tested during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj), where Indonesia received about 220,000 people traveling between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. During peak travel times, each biometric corridor processed over 30 border crossings per minute, ten times the capacity of current biometric electronic gates. In total, more than 50,000 Hajj pilgrims were processed using this new mobile biometric technology. Currently, the three corridors are being used for elderly and disabled travelers. However, it is expected that in the future, the application will be extended to all passengers across the country’s airport infrastructure.
Many airports around the world already use some form of biometric boarding, like the FaceBoarding facial recognition system used in various Spanish airports. Instead of processing individuals one by one, Seamless Corridor captures the facial biometrics of multiple people simultaneously as they walk at a normal pace through the corridor. The facial capture of the new system uses machine learning techniques and 3D models to determine the number of people in the corridor. Cameras analyze image quality and capture a single photograph for comparison when a specified threshold is reached. The system performs preprocessing at the pixel level to compensate for distortions. Amadeus, the technology owner, ensures strict criteria to avoid failures, such as determining the sufficient number of pixels between the subject’s eyes in the captured images.
In an interview with Biometric Update, Jeff Lennon, Senior Vice President of Amadeus for border authorities, ensures that the key to scaling this technology is preselection with remote identity verification. ‘Adoption is crucial, and to drive adoption, it is necessary to focus heavily on designing the customer experience at different points of the journey,’ says Lennon. ‘How do you engage customers, trigger different brains of different cultures, ages, and demographics?’
Concerns About Privacy However, privacy is precisely the major obstacle to the implementation of Seamless Corridor and other similar facial recognition systems, especially in Europe. Even though airlines promote it as an enhancement to the user experience, European regulators believe that systems like FaceBoarding used in Spain collect too much biological data without justifying it as strictly necessary to board a plane. Just a couple of days ago, the Spanish Data Protection Agency imposed a fine of over 10 million euros on Aena and temporarily suspended the system for implementing biometric identification systems at eight airports without a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) as required by the General Data Protection Regulation. The AEPD report states that the system implemented by Aena has three serious privacy issues. Instead of simply comparing your face with your passport, it actively searches for your face in a giant database of travelers, a process the agency deems intrusive and disproportionate.