Israeli company develops behavior-based airport security system

Published 22 December 2005

A start-up uses nuanced voice analysis technique to detect criminal or terrorist intentions; one more behavior-based security measure for airports

It is not often the case that a single device may be used by security guards airports, and marriage counselors, but Israeli company Nemesysco has developed one. The Zuran, Israel-based company has developed its GK-1, an access control system based on multilevel voice analysis technology. If a screener wants to double-check a passenger, the GK-1 asks the passenger three to five questions and analyzes the psychological and emotional voice characteristics of the passenger in order to determine whether to send the passenger through the green (“safe”) corridor or the red (“suspicious”) corridors.

GK-1 conducts the interview in the automatic mode in a native language of a person under test (English, French, Russian, etc.). The time the system requires for determining the veracity of the passenger varies from 30 to 90 seconds.

There are many advantages to this behavioral approach to security: It eliminates the politically inconvenient need for profiling; it spots suspected behavior which my be hidden from the naked eye — and does so in about a minute; it determines the possibility of criminal or otherwise suspicious behavior in a non-intrusive manner; it supplements other security measures such as sniffers and magnometers; and it allows security personnel to concentrate their attention on likely suspects. As importantly, the system “learns” emotional patterns by using a heuristic system, thus improving its accuracy with practice.

-read more at company Web site