Idemia, SITA tackle lost luggage with bag recognition

You arrive at your destination, after a long and uncomfortable flight, and you’re eager to get to your hotel. You wait at the carousel patiently, as the luggage is unloaded, while more and more of your fellow passengers leave with their cases. You wait until you realize yours is missing. You go to the airline desk to report but the problem is compounded when the airline doesn’t even know where your luggage is, and you are left wondering how you will ever replace the irreplaceable item you had in there.

Luckily, Idemia may have come up with a solution. The company is promoting its new Augmented Luggage Identification Experience or ALIX, which has graduated from the trial stage. It is Idemia’s solution to the air travel industry’s annual problem of 28 million bags being lost or misplaced. According to the 2021 IATA Global Passenger Survey, 41 percent of travelers were not satisfied with mishandled luggage redress. A lot of the time the problem occurs when a luggage’s physical tag goes missing.

ALIX uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to digitize and automate the luggage identification process by providing each bag with an augmented digital luggage tag, according to Idemia. The recognition of individual pieces of luggage is based on photos taken when they enter the baggage-handling system, a video produced during the trial period explains. Idemia and SITA announced the expansion of their collaboration to improve baggage handling in December, with Idemia’s computer vision deployed to SITA’s luggage processing system.

The company says the “scalable innovation” will improve airport, airline and ground operations by simplifying and accelerating the identification of misplaced or lost luggage.

The system has been developed in partnership with Air France, with ALIX initially trialed at Paris CDG airport. Idemia reports a high identification performance rate (exceeding 90 percent) from operators at the French airport.

On social media platform X, Idemia has a short video introducing the ALIX concept. The caption reads: “ALIX creates a digital tag for each piece of luggage, helping airlines efficiently reunite bags with their rightful owner, even when physical tags are missing.”

ALIX is built around two components: ALIX Arch and ALIX Core. The former is a fully automatic capture device that provides high-quality images of the five visible sides of the bag. The latter is a cloud-based SaaS platform that processes images and converts bags’ data into an augmented digital luggage tag.

Those interested in ALIX can download a brochure from Idemia here.

Idemia also recently won a 10-year contract extension to upgrade passenger processing at Australian airports.

SITA also picked up biometric bag drop capabilities with its acquisition of Materna IPS last August.

This post was updated at 11:20am Eastern on January 24, 2025 to clarify the involvement of SITA and the solution’s rollout timeline.

Article Topics

airports  |  Augmented Luggage Identification Experience (ALIX)  |  biometrics  |  digital travel  |  IDEMIA  |  identity verification