Combatting frauds on identity and travel documents is a key mission of law enforcement agencies and border guards. Industries have been working on new means to combat frauds on identity, and public authorities are using numerous technologies to accomplish their mission, but permanent innovation is required to fight highly skilled defrauders. A number of European innovation projects have tested new ways to combat fraud but few of them reached an operational level. EINSTEIN objectives is to enhance significantly existing public authorities’ means through innovation, building on technologies proven in the labs but not mature for an operational usage yet. EINSTEIN will deliver six applications essential to fight identity frauds: 1) online ID issuance using a secure cloud-based server for real-time biometric quality checks and fraud detection, 2) mobile document and identity checks using commercially available smartphones, 3) document authentication module to detect fraudulent documents, 4) pre-registration for land-border crossings including biometrics and DTC, 5) EES kiosk with advanced fraud detection using video surveillance, 6) fast track for enrolled travelers using on-the-move face and iris. To ensure TRL7 at a minimum, practitioners will run six different pilot use cases in their own environment. A key objective is also to ensure interoperability and flexibility of all the components developed in the project so that they can be reused in different contexts, possibly by different providers. Design of open, well-defined, standardized interfaces will allow achieving this objective. Privacy being an essential concern of all European citizens and governments, EINSTEIN will take into account privacy-by-design principles, developing flexible components to ease their customization in order to meet not only the European legislation on data protection but also national legislations on this matter, which vary significantly from one country to the other.

The D4FLY project will augment the current capabilities and capacities of border authorities in countering emerging threats in document and identity verification (e.g., forged documents, impostor fraud, morphed faces) at manual and highly automated border control points and in the issuance process of genuine documents. The confluence of D4FLY set of tools and systems will improve the quality of verification and reduce major time sinks in the processes thus enabling real on-the-move border crossing experience for travelers. Novel sensor hardware based on advanced lightfield cameras and novel algorithms developed in the project will enhance verification accuracy and robustness via the combined usage of 2D+thermal face, 3D face, iris and somatotype biometrics. Analytical means to identify known criminals based on somatotype and 3D face data generated from mugshots and observation data will be developed. Various operational needs of end-users with different threat landscapes constitute the backbone of D4FLY development efforts. D4FLY will create a resilient document verification system that can verify a multitude of physical and electronic security features (e.g. Kinegrams®, MLIs, CLIs), detect complex forms of electronic fraud and advanced morphing, and identify fraud in breeder documents. The potential benefit of blockchain technology in identity verification will also be investigated. The D4FLY solution will consist of a border control kiosk geared with enhanced enrolment, verification and detection capabilities; smartphones applications for improved performance and verification capabilities; and a non-stop on-the-move system for biometric verification. The innovation will be validated against European societal values, fundamental rights, privacy, data protection and applicable legislation. Four different border control points and one document fraud expertise center will form the project’s testing and demonstration ground.

The goal of the PROTECT project is an enhanced biometric-based person identification system that works robustly across a range of border crossing types and that has strong user-centric features. The system will be deployed in Automated Border Control (ABC) areas supporting border guards to facilitate smooth and non-intrusive rapid crossing by travellers based on deployment of the next generation of biometric identification detection methods. The ability for the system to efficiently process low-risk travellers, combined with increased levels of accuracy, security and privacy standards and enabling border guards to concentrate resource on higher-risk travellers, are central ambitions of the project. To achieve these goals, a multi-biometric enrollment and verification system is envisaged, taking into account current and next-generation e-Passport chips, mobile equipment and person identification ‘on the move’. Research will be undertaken into optimization of currently deployed biometric modalities, application of emerging biometrics (including contactless finger vein, speaker recognition and angthropometrics), multi-modal biometrics and counter-spoofing, for border control scenarios. An integral part of the project is collection and dissemination of new border-realistic biometric datasets, and systematic evaluation of the developed biometric methods including vulnerability and privacy assessment. The PROTECT project is strongly user-driven and demonstration of the developed biometric system will be conducted at two different border crossing sites. Finally, the PROTECT project will make contributions to facilitating border crossing of bona-fide non-EU citizens as well as evolving standards in biometric systems.