RTA kicks off facial recognition project

02 Sep 2009

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NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) has commenced its rollout of facial recognition technology from Sagem to assist in proof-of-identification and fraud prevention. The implementation follows a successful 2006 trial of the technology commissioned by Austroads.

RTA general manager of strategy and systems David Putt told delegates of the Biometrics Institute conference in Sydney that the first stage of the project will focus largely on backend applications, but hoped to bring the technology to motor registries for enrolment and license renewal applications in the future.

Putt said the technology would work within existing processes. He also said that cost effectiveness and the Authority's ability to make available more complex transactions online would affect the rollout of facial recognition to motor registries. The RTA said it expected the systems to be operational by the end of this month.

"The first stage will really focus on any customer referred internally for proof-of-identification verification," Putt said.

"We'll also use it in our fraud investigation unit to find customers that have multiple licenses. Some people try to get a second license when they're running out of demerit points - we want to catch those people".

Putt said the technology would work within existing processes and would not "change the direction for teams involved in those processes."

He also said that cost effectiveness and the Authority's ability to make available more complex transactions online would affect the rollout of facial recognition to motor registries.

"We have to ask ourselves, how do we get increasingly complex transactions occurring in motor registries online to enable us to have enough time to do new enrolments and renewals with facial recognition technology?" Putt said.

"The question is how to make sure we can do all of these transactions at the same time as adding facial recognition-based transactions."

The cost-effectiveness of rolling out more instances of the technology is also a major consideration.

Putt said the RTA had been in consultation with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to work through any privacy-related issues associated with the rollout.

"We're currently doing a privacy impact assessment," he said.

He said he believed duplication rates for license photos in its database were "very low, [but] significant [enough]".

"It's what we don't know - the known unknowns - that we want to find," Putt said.

Putt also said the RTA is watching Queensland's smart license rollout with interest.

It’s a big win for Sagem which was recently recognised by NIST as the foremost manufacturer of biometrics. The National Institute of Standards and Technologies’ preliminary results of the Portal Challenge tests in its Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC) ranked Sagem Sécurité number one in face recognition, number one in iris recognition and number one in combined recognition for these two biometric technologies.

“I am very proud to have earned this recognition by NIST, acknowledged worldwide for the impartiality and quality of their tests,” said Jean-Paul Jainsky, Chairman and CEO of Sagem Sécurité. “These results are the culmination of many years of research, and once again demonstrate our leadership and technological capabilities.”