Facial Recognition To Debut At Border Checkpoints

Hong Kong residents will be able to enter or leave the city by simply looking into a camera from Wednesday as the Immigration Department introduces facial recognition technology at some of its automated clearance channels.

The airport, the Shenzhen Bay checkpoint and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge will get about 10 upgraded e-channels each.

Officials said in a press conference on Tuesday that they hope the new option would reduce the clearance process time by one second to seven seconds, compared with fingerprint authentication.

"Public health awareness has been greatly aroused during the pandemic. Contact-less e-channels offer fast, convenient and hygienic immigration clearance services for residents," said Assistant Immigration Director Gavin Ho.

"After completing simple enrolment of contact-less e-channels, residents can use mobile app to generate an encrypted QR code to enter the e-channel and then verify their identity with facial verification technology for automated immigration clearance.

"During the process, there's no need to touch a common device."

Officials said people will need to remove their masks briefly when looking into the camera, but that won't take much time so they don't think it would be a problem in terms of public health.

Ho stressed the machine will immediately delete the picture taken after the clearance, and people can opt-out of the service after registration.

He also said the new option won't replace fingerprint authentification, or the traditional manual counters.

"Eligible residents can freely choose whether or not to use this new service. For those who prefer not to, they can continue to complete immigration clearance at e-channels by fingerprint verification or at traditional counters," the assistant director said.

The service will be available to Hong Kong residents aged 11 and above.

Officials hope facial recognition technology will be used at more checkpoints next year.