Wall Street Journal Europe

In Security, the Eyes Tell All:  IBM and Dutch Airport to Sell State-of-the-Art Iris-Scanning System

April 28, 2002
By Kevin J. Delaney and Paulo Prada

BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGIES, much-ballyhooed in the wake of Sept. 11, are starting to come of age commercially.

The latest proof: International Business Machines Corp. will today unveil a partnership with Schiphol Group, operator of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, to sell and install the airport's eye-scanning security technology around the world.

Industry analysts say such a development is key to actually getting the biometric systems -- which use physical characteristics such as fingerprints, hand shapes, and facial contours to identify people -- installed and running.

"We have great technology, good standards, and robust software," says Richard Norton, executive director of the International Biometric Industry Association, a trade group in Washington. "But none of the traditional [IT systems] integrators are true specialists in biometrics and they serve as barriers to the deployment of biometric solutions to their customers."

Like IBM, other industry heavyweights including Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have signaled their interest in the technology and helped put together biometric systems here and there. EDS, for one, helped install a trial screening system at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport Authority.

But there have been few blockbuster contracts to date as other concerns, such as data-privacy issues and questions about the systems' accuracy, brake their spread. In the U.S., biometric systems to screen airport passengers are largely on hold as the government and airports sort out the details of a proposed "trusted traveler" program. Under such a program, individuals could make their way more quickly through security checkpoints, possibly after being identified using biometric data.

"The technology is mature. But the implementations are not, because the demand wasn't there," says Robert Goodwin, vice president for global industries at research firm Gartner Dataquest in San Jose, California. "Now it is there."

While other airports, such as Heathrow in London and Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, are home to biometric test projects, Schiphol is one of the only ones with a fully rolled out program in place to scan passengers. Already one of the most innovative airport companies in the world in terms of selling its management and operational know-how, Schiphol Group now wants to try to convert its eye-scanning security technology platforms into another line of business.

The system, developed over a three-year period, was first introduced at the airport in October and now has some 2,500 registered users. "Since we see that it works it's now something we want to implement and sell to other users," says Pieter Verboom, Schiphol Group's chief financial officer.

The company has already lent some of the technology for testing to Canadian aviation authorities and administrators at Frankfurt and New York's John F. Kennedy airport, two facilities with which it already has various partnerships. Schiphol declined to comment on how much the system cost to develop or how much it will charge to buyers of the technology.

Here's how it works: Schiphol asks travelers -- at present limited to passengers from the European Union, plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein -- to sign up for the program, which carries a 99 euros annual fee. The 15-minute enrollment process includes an electronic check of the traveler's passport and a photograph of his iris, the colored part of the eye. The data are then recorded on a plastic card that looks like a credit card. That allows the traveler to pass through special automated lanes at border control, where his iris is scanned and compared to the information on the card. The system cuts the average waiting time at the security point from at least 10 minutes to as little as 10 seconds.

Schiphol says the equipment works 99% of the time. Deceiving the machine is nearly impossible, it adds, since the human iris, with 244 separate individual characteristics, is the most distinctive part of the human body. Biometrics certainly isn't a new idea. For more than three years, police in the London Borough of Newham in England have been using facial recognition software to try to match images on video surveillance cameras to a database of known felons. Iceland's Keflavik Airport put a similar system into service in September.

But the field is growing dramatically. International Biometric Group LLC, a specialized New York research group and consultancy, predicts that the market for biometric technologies will top $1.9 billion (2.14 billion euros) in 2005, from $523 million last year.

A system installed by the Belgian police forces is part of the new wave of applications that is gathering steam. Under a project launched with a budget of 1.75 million euros last year, the federal and local police have begun assembling a centralized computerized database of digital photos of suspects and convicted criminals. From 13 stations, police can now compare the photos of individuals they have apprehended against those already in the system.

Facial recognition software analyzes the images based on 14 different data points, such as the shape of a person's eyes, mouth and nose. The system, which will be extended to 80 stations by the end of next year, suggests possible matches to known criminals. It is one of the first national rollouts of such a program world-wide.