EU earmarks €190M for new Horizon Europe program, including border management

The European Union has earmarked 190 million euros (US$204.8 million) for projects related to border security, cybersecurity, privacy, crime fighting and crisis management under its Horizon Europe innovation and research program.

The European Commission funding is targeted at Cluster 3 of Horizon Europe titled Civil Security for Society. This includes Border Management 2024, covering topics related to secure identity and travel document management which is set to receive 29 million euros (US$31.3 million) in funding.

Funding proposals can be submitted by November 20th, 2024.

One of Horizon Europe-funded innovation projects is Odysseus, designed to make border crossings easier through seamless identity verification, digital and virtual passports, face matching, behavioral authentication and other technologies

The project involves 14 partners from 12 European countries, including biometrics companies Thales and Vision-Box, and will last until December 2025.

In May, the Odysseus held its fourth plenary meeting, discussing the EU AI Act and the project’s three pilot programs. The International Union of Railways (UIC) Security Division presented a pilot involving railway border crossings between Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The pilot will be conducted next year and is designed to demonstrate technologies for seamless identity verification in a real EU cross-border railway setting.

Another Horizon Europe project is iMars, focused on uncovering document fraud and image manipulation, particularly morphed face images which blend the photos of two individuals to create a hybrid image that resembles both original faces.

iMars is led by Idemia and has a consortium of 24 partners from 12 countries, including industry, government agencies and academia. The company is in charge of detecting altered documents and says it has developed a method to detect presentation (PAD) and adversarial attacks that uses sensors available in smartphones used by border guards.

A demonstration is already available on Android which uses near-field communication (NFC) to read the data of the passport chip, according to the company. An ICAO compliance face quality check to assess the quality of a selfie image while an integrated Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) captures a short video for document analysis.

The project presented its latest findings on face morphing in April, highlighting potential technical solutions and regulatory risks connected to processing facial data.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  border security  |  EU  |  funding  |  IDEMIA  |  identity verification  |  iMARS  |  Odysseus  |  Thales  |  Vision-Box