Airport iris scan gets trial run in Amsterdam
By Celeste Perri
Bloomberg News Service
AMSTERDAM — Alain Vogel can get through immigration procedures at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in under a minute. All he has to do is make eyes at a machine.
Associated Press
Vogel has paid $102 to become a member of Schiphol Groep's Privium program for fast-track border passage. The image of his iris is scanned by a device made by Iridian Technologies Inc. and matched to the data on a smart card, allowing the turnstile to open and grant him passage.
A passenger registers on an iris-scanning machine at Schiphol airport near Amsterdam, allowing fast-track border passage on future flights.
"When the queues are outrageously long, this saves me a lot of time," said Vogel, 28, who flies about seven times a month to London and elsewhere in his capacity as a marketing director.
Because of heightened security procedures, a 45-minute flight from Amsterdam to London can mean waiting twice that long in security and check-in lines. Schiphol is wagering that busy people — and business travelers in particular — are willing to pay to get through lines faster.
Schiphol's not stopping in the Netherlands. The airport, which also operates Terminal 4 at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, has introduced a trial iris-scan program to protect access to the tarmac. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will monitor the results of the program, which is the first of its kind.
Governments and companies are upgrading and introducing biometrics, or the use of physiological or behavioral characteristics to determine identity, to their security systems.
Companies such as Iridian, which holds the patent on iris-scan technology, Viisage Technology Inc. and Identix Inc. are set to benefit as total biometric sales are expected to surge to $4.04 billion by 2007 from $601 million last year, according to the International Biometrics Group.
"As time goes by, huge amounts of money will be spent on both facial and fingerprint scanning," said Richard Perkins, a money manager at Perkins Capital Management Inc. in Minnesota, which invests $250 million and owns about 1.5 million Identix shares. He thinks growth in the industry will come from government spending.
At Schiphol, more than 4,000 people as old as 74 and as young as 12 have paid for the right to zip through passport control and security to duty-free shopping in less than two minutes. Airport officials expect more than 40,000 people to enroll by 2005.
An iris scan also will produce results more quickly than a scan of a fingerprint: A check against 100,000 iris codes in a database takes two seconds. A finger-scan search will take 15 seconds to perform the same task.
Still, iris technology isn't foolproof. It won't work with sunglasses on, though clear glasses impose no hindrance. And it can have an incorrect read-out on people with extremely light or very dark eyes, said Conny Lanza, the Privium project manager.
