Research aims to improve airport security

iris scans work now only with highly cooperative subjects who strike the right pose in the right lighting for the iris to be picked up. A machine designed to mimic an airport metal detector sits in the back room. Savvides’ students double as involuntary models.

As each walks through the machine, his or her face is illuminated in infrared and the iris is captured by the camera. The machine matches the iris with those stored in its database. The computer identifies the subject and says, “Nice to see you.”

Savvides sees the eventual possibility of this technology identifying bad guys whose irises have been stored.

These, however, are compatible guinea pigs who also need a good grade. What about suspects actively avoiding the camera? Those are technologies that the lab is “at the edge of,” Savvides said. That includes a camera that finds a face and can follow it as it moves up to sixty feet away. He is also working on a system that identifies irises from a distance for the Department of Defense, which could take about a year to develop.

Cameras with a far-reaching radius can help to identify a potential terrorist before he reaches the scanners at a security checkpoint, which Savvides calls “the last failure point.” Long-range cameras could track and identify a suspect before he or she gets close to security or soldiers.

The lab mostly works with government contracts, although it had more industry work before the recession, said Savvides.

Face mapping

The team is working with the FBI to map out the human face to help with image profiling. They currently have seventy-nine facial points identified, with the hope of using them as a template for a system that can recognize a face that appears nervous or finicky.

Schwartzel writes that, ironically, it is the most ostensible and human traits that still trip the technology — things such as facial hair or eyeglasses. Savvides wants to work toward a technology that recognizes if the image-captured person is scarred or wearing a hat. Cai’s work also is in the research phase. His projects were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

Once a new technology is ready, the TSA review process can take several years, said TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis. Technology is tested at a facility at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and, if approved, is taken on as part of a pilot program at select airports across the United States.

Whole-body imagers were first deployed in airports in Phoenix in 2007. The TSA has purchased 150 scanners and will buy another 300 to be distributed sometime this year.

By comparison, Pittsburgh’s airport security looks decidedly low-tech. Davis, though, said the airport’s arsenal of metal detectors, luggage scanners, and explosive trace detection machines is comparable to those in most sites across the country. Pittsburgh also has uniformed officers trained in behavior detection.

Though the number of total-body scanners the TSA will have matches the number of commercial airports at 450, Davis said that does not necessarily mean every airport will have one.

Concerns arise

Still, plans of a massive scanner deployment have some advocacy groups worried. “Do these store and record images of American passengers stripped naked? The answer is yes,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Rotenberg said the diversity of bomb-making materials complicates the usefulness of body scanners that can not detect liquid or powder components.

He finds sacrificing privacy misses the big-picture problems, such as an erosion of intelligence or a bureaucratic failure to communicate about a specific threat like the Christmas Day bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. “Oftentimes we’re asked what the harm is in the privacy realm. But this intrusion is the compelled disclosure of one in undress by the government,” he said.

Cai, however, has found concerns over the systems to be unique to the United States, adding that such a system wouldn’t cause much concern in parts of Asia, which have populations more obsequious to the government, or in Europe, where anyone looking for a thrill heads to the beach and not the airport.

Savvides, too, has little concern about his technology leading to a police state. “Have you ever thought about how many cameras are in a casino?” he asked.