Veridos leads new EU research project on border control  - Veridos will head a new EU-funded research project, which focuses on enhancing the quality and efficiency of verification at border crossings. The goal is to reduce the process duration to enable a non-stop border-crossing experience for travelers and to significantly decrease fraud. Veridos will act as a consortium leader and will work together with 18 partners on the project, which gets its funding through the EU Research and Innovation program Horizon 2020.

 

The Veridos-led project, called D4FLY, focuses on the authentication of travelers on the move and document verification with the primary goal of making border control faster and more secure. Research topics will include 3D face recognition, the use of smartphones as a means of identification, document forgery detection, and anti-spoofing. The potential benefit of blockchain technology in identity verification will also be investigated. The project is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program “Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens”.

 

Dr. Silke Bargstädt-Franke, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Management at Veridos explains why the project is needed: “The use of biometrics for identification at border crossings has significantly improved security and efficiency. However, we need to continuously advance the technology in order to tackle abuse and manipulation. D4Fly will, for example, evaluate techniques to detect so called spoofing, which is the use of face masks or other artificial replicas to fool the biometric authentication”.

 

Frank Schmalz, Director of Innovations at Veridos, comments that “Veridos is a trusted partner for many governments around the world that expect state-of-the-art border control solutions. With research projects like D4Fly we strengthen our know-how in the latest technologies and guarantee the delivery of future-proof-solutions”.

 

Four different border control points and one document fraud expertise center will form the project’s testing and demonstration ground including locations in Greece, Lithuania, and the Netherlands. D4Fly is the fourth EU research project for Veridos in recent years. These projects have included the PROTECT project on biometric border technology, which the European Commission has described as an EU research success story.