Home Office spunks another £12.8m on face recog tech
Before £8m spent on IRIS has a chance to hit bottom of bin
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The Home Office is offering £12.8m for new facial recognition technology according to a tender notice from Home Office Procurement published on 12 June.
The new multi-million pound face scanners would be used to determine an applicant's right to a British passport: and must be able to compare the biometric data extracted from the scans of the faces of punters as well as their related biographical data against huge datasets.
The new facial recog tech will need to work within the existing framework of the Border Agency's tech systems - systems demonstrated recently to be fragile – and will operate with the same biometric and biographical data that is currently used.
Beyond the recognition gadgets and the data-scanning software, the Home Office also expects the bidder to provide a system to manage the tech that can easily be borged into the existing Home Office systems.
The notice specifies:
The architecture will comprise a face recognition capability, business rules capability, workflow capability, management information, audit and an data interface from an existing application system. The solution will use existing biographic and biometric information as part of the Facial Recognition checks, with appropriate result based data stored with each check.
The Home Office doesn't have a great track record when it comes to procuring identity-checking technology: its Iris scanners were panned as an £8m cul-de-sac by MPs earlier this year.
Hopefully this procurement session will go a bit better.
the department is accepting bids for the two parts both separately and as a unit. ®
COMMENTS
Sort of Dulux colour chart then
"The new multi-million pound face scanners would be used to determine an applicant's right to a British passport:"
peado white....normal white....suntanned....terrorist.....Indian....black
Would it not just be cheaper to stick a couple of National Front blokes at passport control, 'cos that's what they seem to be meaning!
Border control
I arrived at Gatwick a few weeks back, I was put in the "automated facial recognition" kit queue, my g/f went to the human recognition unit.
She was through in seconds, I had to wait five minutes to get to a station where it took a good minute to check my passport and another 4 minutes to scan my shiny, suntanned old face and work out if I was the same pasty-faced youngster from 6 years ago that's in my passport.
If the tech is slower than a human, it's rubbish tech. If it's slower AND MORE EXPENSIVE, I am one very p*ssed off taxpayer.
I'll accept £12.8M to sit in a booth and 'recognise' people.
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