Facial recognition to replace passports

Sydney: Soon travellers entering or leaving Australia will not need their passports. In a major security overhaul at Australia’s international airports passengers, incoming paper passenger cards will be abolished and manned stations would be replaced by electronic stations and automatic triage. Passengers would not need to show their passports, instead being processed by biometric recognition of their faces, irises and/or fingerprints, the Guardian reported. Australia's immigration minister Peter Dutton said the aim was for more than 90 per cent of passengers to avoid paperwork or manual processing by staff.

“In many cases that will mean people, whilst they'll still have to carry their passport, may not have to present their passport at all in the long term,” he told ABC News. The department of immigration and border protection will start moving towards a “contactless” system for arrivals this year, Fairfax reported on Sunday – the most ambitious stage of the Seamless Traveller initiative announced in 2015. A spokeswoman said automated processing technology provided a simpler process for travellers and enabled the Australian Border Force to meet the challenges of increasing traveller numbers “while maintaining the security of our border”.

John Coyne, head of border security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Fairfax the system could be a world-first. The government aims to have 90% of travellers processed automatically, with no human involvement at all, by 2019-20. But how that will be executed remains to be seen, the Guardian said. Just under $94m to be spent over five years from 2015 was budgeted for the Seamless Traveller project of “next-generation automatic biometric processing at major air and sea ports”. Fairfax said the department wants to trial the technology in July at Canberra airport before introducing it at a major airport in November.