Passport Service to spend up to €6m on 'critical' renewal of facial recognition system
It’s believed that up to 1.7 million applications could be made to the Passport Office this year, far exceeding the peak of around 900,000 received in a single year before the pandemic. Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos
The Passport Service is set to spend up to €6 million on the “critical” renewal of its facial recognition system, as it deals with a deluge of applications in the coming months.
Significant investment has been made in recruitment on the Passport Service and this additional funding will run the support and maintenance of the facial recognition technology used for up to five years.
It’s believed that up to 1.7 million applications could be made to the Passport Office this year, far exceeding the peak of around 900,000 received in a single year before the pandemic. More than 100,000 applications currently form the backlog in the system.
According to tender documents from the Department of Foreign Affairs, upgrading its facial recognition infrastructure is an essential part of the passport programme.
The Department said: “Due to the critical nature of this Competition to the overall Passport Reform Programme, the [Dept] expects the analysis, design, build and implementation phases of the project to be completed within 6 months from the signing of the contract, with ongoing support and maintenance thereafter.”
It currently uses facial recognition technology in processing all passports, both paper and online applications.
At present, it uses three types of facial matching. The first compares a new photo submitted against the most recent gallery image for that applicant. Typically, it will compare a person’s new photo accompanying their renewal application with the one from the previous passports.
Another compares a submitted photo against all the photos in the main gallery, while the other compares a passport application image to “an isolated grouping of watchlist images”.
“The Passport Service also has the ability to perform ad hoc searches and many [images] to many matching as required,” it said. Three teams of people use the system for facial recognition, including a team responsible for investigating cases that have been “escalated”.
The new system must have a “high degree of performance and accuracy” in its algorithms with “modern integration capabilities” and a “rich, intuitive and efficient user experience”.
The deadline for submissions for this tender is in March, with the Department indicating that the system must be in place six months after contracts are signed. The new system comes amid the high demand for passports as Covid restrictions ease and people turn to foreign travel in greater numbers this year.
In an attempt to cope with the deluge, the service is currently recruiting 300 additional staff, to bring the total number of workers to 775 by the end of the month. It is hoped this will be bolstered further to 900 workers by late March.
The Department said that the additional staff will help to reduce turnaround times and to respond to the current and anticipated high demand for first-time and renewal passports in 2022.
The office will also operate extended hours to deal with the record surge in applications, with 137,452 made last month alone. Late last year, the Department of Foreign Affairs awarded a contract worth €14.7 million for a new system for issuing passports.
However, the Department said it would take a number of years for this system to bed in so won’t go towards clearing the current backlog. “It will not assist in addressing the immediate challenges facing the Passport Service but it should mitigate the risk of such challenges in future,” it said.
