What is Biometric Facial Recognition

Since the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, the world has been on a heightened alert to the types of things that can go wrong when travelers say they're someone other than who they're by presenting false documents in an effort to acquire entry in to an unsuspecting country. Often times, even though the documents are real, they don't indicate the person holding them as who they in reality are.

This can be the perfect set up for someone who would do harm to the country they're travelling to. Either that or they don't wish the government of their destination country to know they have arrived for whatever reason -- usually, though, this reason falls somewhere along the criminal scale and the traveler is ultimately up to no good, usually.

even so, governments, with the coming of biometric passport technology, are introducing ways in which unauthorized individuals will no longer be able to acquire access to a country as easily as they previously could. The types of technology that a lot of of the newer passports are employing includes fingerprint scans, iris scans and biometric facial recognition.

But, what is biometric facial recognition? If you think it sounds like something right out of Science Fiction, then you would be right, although the technology is very real and is used in an effort to keep a larger portion of any given country's citizenry as safe as possible. In the short version, a person's face -- in this case, the passport holder -- is scanned onto the embedded micro computer chip.

As they travel, the passport holder will encounter kiosks known as "Public Key Infrastructure" (or PKI, for short) which will then scan the contents of the electronic portion of a biometric passport to make sure the person travelling is in reality who they say they're. In the case of biometric facial recognition, the PKI will do a quick scan of the passport owner's facial features and so compare it to the features that are located inside the computer chip itself.

This scanning is the surest manner possible to ensure that all features in a biometric facial recognition scan match 100%. it's this match that ensures the officials you are who you say you are. a lot of in the United States feel that it's an invasion of privacy, but the bottom line is that most, if not all, of the accessible technology will soon be accessible as well. Too, given the larger push towards biometric facial recognition will more likely become the rule instead of the exception.