clipped from: www.guardian.co.uk   

Face scans for air passengers to begin in UK this summer


A face recognition system

A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips on passports. Photograph: Image Source/Getty


Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.


From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.


But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.


biometric passports, containing a computer chip holding the carrier's facial details