Fujitsu biometric self enrolment kiosks piloted for presentation attack detection

The Home Office in the United Kingdom will be running an unsupervised self-service kiosk trial in the UK relying on biometric technologies by Fujitsu, which won a tender first published last year.

The trial, which will last for a minimum of three-month, cost the government up to £500,000 (US$607,475). It will see the deployment of kiosks capable of securely enrolling face and fingerprint biometrics and biographics from customers without staff assistance.

“The Home Office’s ambition is that all visitors and migrants will provide their biometric facial images and fingerprints under a single global immigration system ahead of travel to the UK, utilizing remote self-enrolment for those who are not required to apply for a visa as part of an ecosystem of enrolment options,” reads the heavily redacted tender.

The UK government also confirmed it ran separate ‘Biometrics Self-Enrolment Feasibility Trials’ from 29 November to 22 December 2021.

“This trial will be the next stage of testing for self-service kiosks to understand how they perform in the operational setting when there is no staff supervision,” explains the tender.

“In the future, the Home Office envisages that self-service kiosks will be one of the enrolment options available as part of an ecosystem of options.”

In particular, Fujitsu will provide four biometric self-service kiosks as part of the trials. Three will be hosted in the Home Office biometrics enrolment location for the aforementioned purposes, while the fourth will be deployed at a presentation detection attack (PAD) testing facility operated by Ingenium Biometrics on the campus of the University of Kent.

The latter deployment aims at improving the resilience of Fujitsu’s biometric algorithms to prevent attempts to spoof the automatic kiosks.

Ingenium also provided PAD testing services for the 2021 trials, which the current deployment is a continuation of.

According to a report by the Mirror, the kiosks deployed as part of the new pilot use similar technology to that evaluated in a 2019 study by the University of Kent unrelated to the current Home Office trial. The paper, which is not linked in the Mirror article (but appears to be this one), describes gaze-based PAD.

“A gaze-based spoofing detection system has been extensively evaluated using data captured from volunteers performing genuine attempts (with and without wearing such tinted glasses) as well as spoofing attempts using various artefacts,” reads the paper.

“The results of the evaluations indicate that the presence of tinted glasses has a small impact on the accuracy of attack detection, thereby making the use of such gaze-based features possible for a wider range of applications.”

Fujitsu does not manufacture its own kiosks.

The biometric kiosks supplied by Fujitsu are expected to be delivered to the Home Office by 30 April 2023.

This post was updated at 10:14am Eastern on January 17, 2023 to include the role of Ingenium and clarify that the University of Kent paper is not related to the Home Office trial.

Article Topics

biometric enrollment  |  biometrics  |  border security  |  face biometrics  |  fingerprint biometrics  |  Fujitsu  |  Home Office Biometrics (HOB)  |  kiosk  |  presentation attack detection  |  tender  |  UK