Since the public launch of the system in late January, Ellison has maintained that 98 per cent of users are "successfully recognised by the system's face recognition system". However, just two weeks before the launch, Australian Customs Service (ACS) reported that Qantas staff that volunteered for the trial had to be diverted to customs officers for manual processing in at least one in five transactions.
The ACS reported in an internal Qantas staff gazette in mid-January that "approximately 80 percent" of the 6,000 transactions that took place over the period were successful. Late-last year ACS said it had been aiming to achieve a success rate in the high 90s before launching the technology.
It is understood that equipment fitted with face recognition cameras placed at customs entry points create a mathematical algorithm of an individual's face stored and compare it with one stored on his or her passport.
ACS insisted that the failures were not caused by the photo-matching technology, claiming that most failures occurred because passports could not be read by the system. The report also highlighted mistakes enrolling volunteer images and discrepancies in ACS and Qantas crew records as key areas of concern.
There are also indications that Qantas air crews are cynical about the system's value.
The ACS claims pilots and flight attendants have taken up the SmartGate system at a steady rate since it opened enrolments in October last year.
According to the Australian International Pilots Association Qantas employs 2400 mainline jet pilots. The Flight Attendants Association of Australia has around 3800 Qantas long haul flight attendants among its membership.
Around 3000 flight crews volunteered for the SmartGate program during the six week enrolment period before the system was operational. In the three-month period to 6 March that crews had an opportunity to evaluate the system only a further 578 had enrolled.
One Qantas staff member told ZDNet Australia the consensus among air crews was that SmartGate saved little time clearing customs, offering little incentive to staff to enrol.
According to the staff member, the SmartGate spares customs officers entering passport details in customs systems manually, but said crew members still have to go through manual face-to-passport verification during mandatory quarantine and import declaration stages of re-entering the country.
The ACS, which claimed last year that the system had been developed in order to deal with an anticipated doubling of traffic across Australian borders by 2010, denies that an additional manual face-to-passport check is required.
However, after three months of testing SmartGate, the ACS said it is yet to calculate the time saved from total average required to process crew members.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was allocated AU$3 million to develop the passport system in May last year. It followed shortly after the US House of Representatives, responding to the September 11 attacks, passed the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Bill 2001 that would require foreigners entering its borders to hold passports containing a machine-readable biometric by the end of 2003.
ACS initially planned to trial SmartGate for six months from November 26 last year before its public launch. The live trial was shortened to around six weeks before a public launch January. At the time a spokesperson for the ACS said the program had attracted a lot of interest from overseas and that it was "becoming increasingly difficult to say 'we're just trialing it' repeatedly"
The federal government has attracted criticism from biometric technology specialists, who say that the facial biometric systems are not accurate enough for national security tasks and some claim the system has been rushed to implementation meet foreign agendas.
Peter Lee, managing director of Brisbane-based security company ComSecent Enterprises, said many questions remain about the federal governments decision to signimplement SmartGate.
"Why run with a relatively untried and unproven system over other options that have a) been tried and tested b) but have not been placed up against this system to test the veracity of statements made about it in the media and c) go with facial recognition when large trials in the USA have rejected facial scanning as a suitable security response?" asked Lee in a statement given to ZDNet Australia.
However, Ellison rejected any notion that the SmartGate program had been rushed.
"There has been no rush to have the first system in place - the project commenced more than a year before the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Bill was enacted in the USA."
Ellison said the ACS posted a brief to industry on the Commonweath Internet tender site seeking expressions of intrest in developing a the passport as early as July 2001. Ellison said that facial biometric system had been endorsed by the International Air Travel Organisation (ICAO) and was a natural choice for border applications.
"Australia is using face recognition in the border control application as it is less intrusive than other biometrics such as fingerprint and iris recognition.
"Face recognition is also a universal biometric. All other biometrics have some difficulty enrolling at least some people. It is important for the border-crossing environment that the chosen biometric be broadly applicable to the general population."
