Immigration minister Liam Byrne last week unveiled a
£50,000 image-based database system that associates fingerprints, a
visa and a unique passport number with an individual. The system is
the latest plank in the government's £400me-Bordersborder control technology
platform.
The pilot system to confirm the identity of visitors to the UK
will run at Gatwick North Terminal from September 2007 to April
2008, using data from visa applicants from Sierra Leone. If
successful, the government may extend it to cover up to five
million visitors a year from non-European countries, excluding the
US.
The pilot is part of a wider biometric-based border control
system for the EU called BioDev 2. The BioDev 2 consortium members
are Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain
and the UK. A Home Office spokesman said the project is 80% funded
by the EU. Britain has contributed about £28,000 to the European
Commission for BioDev 2.
Motorola, Zetes and Sagem, which earlier supplied the iris
recognition system for the Home Office's "trusted traveller"
scheme, are the three main suppliers to the BioDev project.
Motorola supplied the Gatwick installation, and will install
similar systems in other EU countries later.
Mike Lyne, assistant director at the Border & Immigration
Agency, said the department is pleased with the system's
performance so far. Some 5,000 names and related images are in the
pilot database.
Most come from the collection
UKVisas has been building since September 2006, when giving
biometric details became compulsory for visa applications from some
countries.
Fred Preston, Motorola's project leader, said the system finds a
matching record in milliseconds.