Airport securityJapan to adopt automated airport gates equipped with facial recognition technology

Japan’s Ministry of Justice plans to adopt automated airport immigration gates supported by facial recognition technology as the country anticipates an increase in the number of foreign visitors while the number of immigration officers remains limited. “Speeding up immigration procedures is an important issue, but increasing the number of immigration officials commensurate with the rising volume of work is not a realistic option,” a justice ministry official said.

Some Japanese airports already allow registered passport holders and mid-to-long term foreign residents to use automated gates with fingerprint readers, but public resistance and concerns about privacy have stalled the popularity of the fingerprint method.

The facial recognition system, currently in test mode, reads facial image data from IC chips embedded in passports and compares it against a photograph taken at the immigration gate to determine if the identities match. Supporters of the technology say that unlike biometric identification systems like fingerprint scanners, users of facial recognition technology do not need to register prior to the system photographing them at immigration gates. Australia and the United Kingdom adopted facial recognition systems at immigration gates in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

Mainichi reports that roughly 29,000 users participated in Japan’s first trial during the summer of 2012. Cases in which the facial recognition system correctly identified the person being photographed as the person in the passport photo took an average of 17.4 seconds between the time passports were scanned and the gates were opened; while immigration officials tend to take thirty seconds. The system has gained a 90 percent favorability rate from trial participants.

Officials do point out that a 17 percent error rate, in which the system failed to accurately recognize roughly one in every five trial participant, would need to be fixed. Errors were mainly due to the positioning of faces as the photographs were being taken, the room lighting, and bangs (fringe hairstyles).

A general concern with using facial recognition technology at immigration gates is that passports can be valid for a decade, while a person’s appearance may change within that timeframe. “Determining whether the system will be able to identify faces that have changed over the course of ten years will be an important part of the trial,” said Aiko Omi, an immigration data analyst at the ministry of justice.

Immigration officials are now conducting further testing to help perfect the system before the number of foreign travelers increase dramatically. More than eleven million people visited Japan last year, the highest on record, and the government is anticipating close to twenty million foreigners in 2020, the year Tokyo will host the Summer Olympics and Paralympics.

Another concern with the proposed system is how facial data image collected will be stored or erased. Trial participants will have their photographs destroyed five years after study results have been analyzed, and electronics manufacturers participating in the most recent trial will destroy the data by year-end. “There is nothing problematic in terms of how we are handling the personal information,” said an official at the Immigration Bureau.

Koji Ishimura, an information law professor at Hakuoh University remains concerned. “If there are exceptions to the intended use of the data, it’s important to get users’ consent only after they’ve been made aware of exemptions. If possible, a monitoring body that includes representatives from the general public should be set up to assess how the system is operated and how complaints are handled,” he said, adding that “unless we establish a framework in which people are monitoring systems, and not the other way around, operation of the facial recognition system will not go smoothly.”