By the year-end, Hyderabad airport plans to introduce face-recognition as a mechanism to ease the passenger traffic. With this system, passengers won’t need to furnish their travel documents, ID proof and boarding pass at multiple checkpoints, claim Hyderabad airport authorities.
The authorities said that they have tested the mechanism with their staff three months ago and following its success, they have approached the regulatory authorities for their approval, which they are likely to get by year-end.
Authorities said that they will set up 3-D cameras at three levels of checkpoints, where passengers are required to furnish their documents to prove that they are bona fide passengers.
GHIAL—GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited claims that this is the first time that such a technology would be introduced in India.
According to officials, this system will be first introduced to domestic passengers and later extended to international passengers.
Officials said that they have received numerous complaints where passengers were being forced to wait at check-in counters and other points because the words on their travel documents would be smudged or invisible. This pushed them to go for such a technology, which is paperless and non-intrusive.
An official from the GHIAL said, “We will have high-end 3-D cameras with facial-recognition tool. The passenger just needs to look at them. As a first step, they have to enrol with us and their data gets registered in our system. For the next travel, they need not furnish their IDs at the entrance.”
“This is to avoid intrusion of security personnel. Out of the three entry points, one of them will be used for this purpose,” he said.
He further added that these cameras will be positioned at other touch points like security and boarding gate. “The passenger will no longer need to furnish their boarding pass and show their identity card. The cameras will pull details of them from the system automatically. We hope that this will ease the traffic at the airport.”
It must be recalled that the GHIAL has already introduced barcode/QR code based e-boarding for end-to-end stamp-less, seamless, paperless journey for domestic passengers.