Tourism industry deploys computer vision in Kazakhstan and Japan

Smart Engines is supplying its optical character recognition (OCR) technology to HT.KZ, a leading travel agency in Kazakhstan, to facilitate border control checks.

HT.KZ has deployed Smart Engines’ on-premise GreenOCR solution for scanning biometric passports as part of its tour-booking system to make it faster and more convenient, according to the company announcement, by replacing manual entry of passport data. The low-power, environmentally-friendly scans take less than a second, Smart Engines says. The agency’s booking system uses a server-side implementation of the ID-scanning technology.

“The booking system plays an important role in the work of a modern travel agency and the opportunities that it offers to the company’s employees and customers,” says Maxim Banin, founder of HT.KZ. “And, of course, the key issue is the application of innovative practices that can bring the service to a qualitatively new level. Smart Engines technologies provide OCR of high accuracy and open up new opportunities for optimizing our business processes.”

Smart Engines’ OCR technology is in use at HT.KZ’s offices in Almaty, Nur-Sultan, Shymkent and Petropavlovsk.

The company’s passport-scanning OCR was also deployed recently at an airport in Moscow.

Japanese airport deploys facial analysis

Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport has deployed facial recognition-based technology for visitor analysis to boost the recovery of the region’s tourism sector from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Age and gender will be among data collected and aggregated to inform marketing strategy for the region’s tourism industry, according to an announcement by the airport.

The project is being subsidized by the Japan Tourism Agency, and is intended to encourage visitors to visit attractions where visitor volumes have declined, such as the Yado Oigawa Kawane Ruins.

The collaboration includes installations at four separate locations in the airport, is set to run through February, 2022.

A facial recognition payment Proof of Concept developed by NEC and VeriTrans was deployed to various locations around Shizuoka Prefecture earlier this year to help the region’s battered tourism industry.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  border management  |  computer vision  |  document reader  |  facial analysis  |  Japan  |  OCR  |  Smart Engines  |  travel and tourism