Panasonic eases passenger congestion at Heathrow Airport with iris recognition technology

Running since 2005, ‘Project Iris', the project to install Panasonic iris recognition readers at Heathrow Airport, has improved passenger flow and eased congestion in the airport's immigration halls.

The concept of the system is to capture a high-resolution image of the human iris and use pattern recognition methods to identify its origin.  The iris of the eye is near impossible to duplicate, making it a robust method of access control.  The result is a mathematical representation of the iris, which can be stored and used as a comparative tool to identify each passenger.  

Panasonic's iris recognition technology has not only been installed in terminals 1-5 at Heathrow, but also North and South at Gatwick as well as 1-2 at Manchester and Birmingham.  Frequent UK visitors, overseas nationals and British citizens are all eligible to sign up and use the technology at Heathrow.

Statistics show that there has been in excess of 120,000 enrolments so far with more than 550,000 people passing through Iris on their way through passport controls.  Passengers who sign up to the service can clear passport control within seconds, bypassing conventional passport checks and speeding up their time spent in customs.  After pre-registering, passengers can then pass through automated booths on arrival to the UK by having their iris identified through the readers.  Data of users' iris patterns are then cross-matched with passport details to identify each individual.  The data is kept separated from all other passenger information and is maintained in a secure database at Heathrow.