Home Secretary Priti Patel has claimed that'contactless corridors' at UK airports will let British citizens skip passport queues and breeze through border controls in just two years' time. It is thought the corridors will use concealed cameras to scan people's faces as they walk through, and compare them with a digital database of details that all visitors will have to submit before travelling – possibly via an app. If a match is found, they will be cleared for entry into the UK without having to stop or scan their passport, while those that don't match will be redirected back to customs. The UK government will be trialling the corridors at airports in 2024, prior to a full rollout planned for 2025. The new automated border screening system would replace having to go through an eGate or speaking to a Border Force officer.

A new partnership has been formed between Paravision and HID Global to combine the former's facial recognition and biometric liveness detection with the latter's hardware, integration, software and services. The partners plan to build enterprise-grade solutions under the HID brand for biometric access control to a range of applications across the retail, banking, air travel and healthcare sectors. The integrated solutions will offer high security with GDPR-compliant privacy protection, according to a promotional video posted to LinkedIn. Paravision President and COO Benji Hutchinson told Biometric Update in an email that the company sees the partnership with HID as a major step towards expanding its global footprint in both the public and commercial sectors. "There will be strong commercial growth as face recognition, identity, and computer vision software proliferates a number of non-traditional (outside of government sector) platforms," Hutchinson predicts.

Paravision has been awarded a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) to provide the artificial intelligence expertise it has acquired in developing facial recognition and computer vision algorithms to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Under the agreement, Paravision will support the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center's (JAIC's) Data Readiness for Artificial Intelligence Development (DRAID) program. The company will contribute its expertise in complex AI systems and machine learning models, and in particular those with what the company refers to as'rigorous data requirements.' JAIC's DRAID program has a total value of up to $241 million, according to the company announcement. The selection process by JAIC centered AI ethics, Paravision says, pointing to its ethics committee and low false non-match rates across demographics in NIST face biometrics testing.

Paravision has introduced a Software Development Kit (SDK) with Person Detection and Advanced Attribute Analytics capabilities to compliment or run independently of its facial recognition. The new computer vision toolset uses video streams or still images, and operates on standard compute platforms, operating systems, and programming languages, to detect the presence and location of people without necessarily identifying who they are with biometrics, according to a company statement. The system can also associate certain attributes with individuals detected. The capabilities can be used alongside Paravision's facial recognition technology as long as the video streams and photos have high enough image quality. The Person Detection capability works on a wide range of deployment distances, from far away with lower-resolution to higher resolution close up views and in different operational environments.

Late last year, San Francisco face-recognition startup Everalbum won a $2 million contract with the Air Force to provide "AI-driven access control." Monday, another arm of the US government dealt the company a setback. The Federal Trade Commission said Everalbum had agreed to settle charges that it had applied face-recognition technology to images uploaded to a photo app without users' permission and retained them after telling users they would be deleted. The startup used millions of the photos to develop technology offered to government agencies and other customers under the brand Paravision. Paravision, as the company is now known, agreed to delete the data collected inappropriately.