Automatic Biometric Verification and Personnel Tracking for Seamless Airport Areas Security Management – MOVEMENT

Airports are very sensitive infrastructure, divided into closed and open areas, public and service areas as well as national and international areas, with borders and related border checks areas. Service areas are dedicated to maintenance, aircraft ground handling, airfreight activities, etc. Complex closed areas also exist such as customs control rooms or luggage loading/unloading areas.
MOVEMENT focuses on those non public areas with restricted access. The objective is to propose a new concept for the airport’s non public security zones management along with the development of an innovative supervision system prototype.
The MOVEMENT concept is built around the current division of the airport restricted area in several zones dedicated to specific activities and having their own security level regarding staff authorisation of access and movement. Each staff member has a well-defined access to multiple areas with the associated authorisation level, but does not have necessarily the right to access the other areas. Those areas can be defined physically (walls and doors, fences, etc.) or can be virtually delimited (ground lines...). Therefore, personnel movements tracking and traceability have to be improved in order to facilitate their passage through the different zones, while insuring a high level of security to prevent any unauthorized access. The supervision prototype will rely on two innovative technical solutions to achieve automated tracking of personnel’s movements through the different airport’s zones, using privacy preserving techniques.
First, the MOVEMENT prototype will be based on the use of reliable “on-the-fly” (without contact) biometrics for seamless authorization verification, in order to provide a flexible and comfortable solution. Biometrics technologies provide very reliable means to perform such control. The privacy preserving techniques will allow verifying the personnel access right to a given area without directly checking the identity, (e.g. using a weak-link architecture). Biometric samples are acquired by sensors and then compared against a database of authorised “ID number” of the personnel. “On-the-fly” biometric capture and verification is performed automatically and naturally while people are moving through different airport areas. Biometrics modalities concerned are primarily face or iris recognition. The implementation of “on-the-fly” biometrics would facilitate staff movement by automatically granting access between two areas but would also improve the traceability of the movement of each individual. Especially for virtually delimited areas, “on-the-fly” biometric will be performed with appropriately located sensors which will enable the access right verification for people circulating in the area.
Secondly, the MOVEMENT prototype will rely on video-surveillance means to allow people and vehicle tracking. Innovative solutions will be developed to track staff and vehicles movements in the restricted area. This monitoring aims to detect abnormal situation such as suspicious personnel or vehicle trajectory, unknown vehicle... This tracking feature also enables to provide operational information to the areas’ central management and will help to facilitate field operations, but also to improve staff safety and anticipate potential issues. Video tracking will be associated with the outputs of the “on-the-fly” biometric modules to benefits from all available information in order to increase the robustness of the tracking, providing better traceability. In particular, it might greatly help to speed up the staff crossing through the different airport areas by building reference procedures and automated movements projection for each personnel. Finally, privacy risks analysis will be performed as well as a legal framework study. Social acceptability study will provide recommendations for privacy compliance.