01 August 2007
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"This report concerns a case study of automated border crossing systems based on biometrics at the four largest European airports: Schiphol, Frankfurt, Charles de Gaulle, and Heathrow.
All four systems are fully working and enable the registered passengers to cross the border in a convenient way. Both iris-based and fingerprint-based systems operate well without significant differences. The encountered problems do not concern the biometrics, but rather the practical design of the checkpoints and the human interfaces.
However, all systems operate on a small scale and cover only about one percent of the passenger flow. Furthermore, the systems are highly different in many ways including how they store the data, what token the passenger needs, and the design of the gates. As a consequence, the systems are currently specific to the respective airport with no interoperability at all.
Despite the limited scale of the studied systems, they prove the concept of automated biometric border crossing."
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