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.

Though difficult to quantify, the variety of possible ID document frauds at borders is a reality that threatens politicians holding responsibility for borders as well as EU citizens. Based on the needs expressed by practitioners, the iMARS consortium has shaped a project that will: 1/ improve the operational capacity of passport application and border control operators by providing both - short-term adhoc solutions ensuring reliable passport application procedures - and mid-term solutions with no-reference and differential analysis solutions that can in particular detect manipulated and morphed passport images as well as document fraud. iMARS will provide: • Image morphing and manipulation attack detection solutions to assess ID documents validity against document fraud, during enrolment and renewal steps, as well as at the border crossing stations • Document verification and fraud detection solutions to support border guards in the verification process by providing mobile tools that can check document’s integrity To reach the targeted TRL6, these technologies will be validated in laboratory conditions using operational data collected from six border control sites (with border to countries outside EU). 2/ ensure the uptake of its outcomes after the project’s end. iMARS will: • promote usability/ergonomic aspects by providing training, guidelines and best practices to border guards and passport application officers • contribute to the ongoing standardisation efforts in the field of Presentation Attack Detection and face image quality • provide open access benchmarks (2 datasets with multiple enrolment morphed face images and border gate probe images) on a specific testing platform serving follow-on research activities • ensure that the technologies developed are accepted by citizens and respect privacy and legal EU regulations.