Face recognition and the future air travel experience

Airports uniquely demand both a very high passenger throughput and a very high degree of security underpinned by the positive identity confirmation of those passengers. At multiple points throughout the air travel experience, traveler identity must be confirmed to meet commercial policy, physical security, or national security requirements. This uncommon set of demands has forced innovation in the form of automated identity confirmation, primarily using biometrics. For two decades, some combination of face, fingerprint, and iris recognition has been deployed in an effort to speed up identity confirmation, with the goal of creating a secure and frictionless passenger experience. Thanks to rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and specific technologies like Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks, face recognition, in particular, has dramatically improved in the last few years.