Bulgaria’s Varna and Burgas international airports have deployed biometric ABC e-gates.
Any passengers holding electronic machine-readable travel documents, citizens of the EU, EEA and Switzerland over 18 can now use the Automated Border Control (ABC) e-gates.
The gates use face recognition to identify passengers, matching the details against the biometrics templates embedded in the chip of the travel document. Fingerprint-reader technology will also be activated later.
When the fingerprint reading capabilities are activated to complement facial verification, the Bulgarian airports will become the first to offer a multimodal biometric solution in the Balkans.
The implementation of ABC technology represents a shift from the traditional border control to biometric technology and self-service.
At the e-gates, passengers have their travel documents authenticated and identity checked by way of face recognition and match against the biometrics templates embedded in the chip of the travel document (soon fingerprint will be available as well).
There is no need for passengers to interact directly with the authorities at the border control point, which clears manual immigration lines.
The supplier of the biometric ABC e-gates is Portuguese company Vision-box.
Jean-François Lennon, Director of Global Business Development, Sales and Marketing at Vision-Box:
“In modern airports like Varna and Burgas, facing constantly increasing flows at the border, it is imperative to embrace new technologies that concede the traveler more control and better convenience during his journey, while delivering the most efficient and effective tools to the Border Control Authorities to increase their capacity”.
This means an improvement of the passenger experience and the Border Control authorities.
Instead of following the traditional manual verification, more vulnerable to errors, Border Control officers are now taking advantage of highly dependable technology and transferring their focus to security procedures with greater added-value.
Having real-time access to all processes happening at the e-gates, by means of a fully integrated software platform, they overrule the system and act only in case of any issue is detected by the e-gates (i.e. fraudulent Passport, unruly passenger etc).
