Home Office seeks Biometric Bidders for Facial Recognition Technology

After encountering problems with the use of iris scanners, UK’s Home Office has issued a notice to the public offering £12.8 million for companies willing to come up with a new facial recognition technology that can complement the existing system.

This new facial scanner will be used to determine a person applying for British passport. Biometric data captured from the scan will be compared to related biographical datasets currently used.

Despite the problems, especially with the use of iris scanners, which rendered delays for days and generated complaints from passengers, this new facial recognition technology need to weave with the existing framework of the Border Agency’s tech systems. It needs to operate with the same biometric and biographical data and provide a system to manage the technology into the existing Home Office systems.

As specified in a tender noticed published online by Home Office Procurement, “The architecture will comprise a face recognition capability, business rules capability, workflow capability, management information, audit and an data interface from an existing application. The solution will use existing biographic and biometric information as part of the Facial Recognition checks, with appropriate result based data stored with each check.”

The system comes in two parts and the department is accepting bids for the two parts separately and as a unit.

Article Topics

access control  |  biometrics  |  border control  |  facial recognition  |  government purchasing  |  iris recognition