Bengaluru International Airport in a race to be India’s first airport with facial recognition

• The Bengaluru International Airport (BIAL), in partnership with Vision-Box, has announced that they will be introducing facial recognition by Q1 2019.
• The first phase of the rollout will include selected airlines, namely, Spice Jet, Air Asia and Jet Airways.
  
• While BIAL hopes to be the first airport with paperless boarding, they will be in competition with the Varanasi International Airport who are aiming to do the same under the government’s DigiYatra scheme.

Around the world, the concept of paperless boarding is still fairly uncommon though widely recognised as convenient. India’s own Bengaluru International Airport (BIAL) has announced its plans of upgrading security measures to include biometric self-boarding technology, or simply put, facial recognition.

In a partnership with Vision-Box, a biometrics solutions service provider, BIAL has plans of rolling out paperless boarding for select airlines starting next year. The initiative is in-line with the government’s DigiYatra scheme that aims to minimise paperwork for air travel under a digital system for airport entry and boarding flights.

India’s first paperless airport

Facial recognition seems to be the second most trending term in technology after artificial intelligence (AI). While a lot of airports around the world already implement paperless boarding, India is yet to take-off on this initiative.

DigiYatra has already started installing their automated security system in Varanasi at the Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport where the airport director, AK Rai, has speculated that the airport will be ready go live with their services by October.

In addition, the DigiYatra scheme will also extend to the Visakhapatnam airport and the Kolkata airport as well.

That being said, government projects run the risk of not being on time, so there’s a high possibility that BIAL might actually be India’s first paperless boarding airport. The first phase of their roll-out will include Jet Airways, Spice Jet and Air Asia in the first quarter of 2019. If done on time, BIAL could be the first airport to have a end-to-end solution of paperless air travel.