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. 2014 Aug 18;9(8):e103510.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0103510. eCollection 2014.

Passport officers' errors in face matching

David White  1 , Richard I Kemp  1 , Rob Jenkins  2 , Michael Matheson  3 , A Mike Burton  4
Affiliations

Passport officers' errors in face matching

David White et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Photo-ID is widely used in security settings, despite research showing that viewers find it very difficult to match unfamiliar faces. Here we test participants with specialist experience and training in the task: passport-issuing officers. First, we ask officers to compare photos to live ID-card bearers, and observe high error rates, including 14% false acceptance of 'fraudulent' photos. Second, we compare passport officers with a set of student participants, and find equally poor levels of accuracy in both groups. Finally, we observe that passport officers show no performance advantage over the general population on a standardised face-matching task. Across all tasks, we observe very large individual differences: while average performance of passport staff was poor, some officers performed very accurately--though this was not related to length of experience or training. We propose that improvements in security could be made by emphasising personnel selection.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Example photo-ID and results for Photo-to-Person test.
(a) Example valid ID-photos (left column) alongside invalid photos of foil identities (right column). (b) Performance on Person-to-Photo test as a function of Employment Duration (note three participants were excluded from this analysis because the duration of their employment was unknown). The individuals pictured in this figure have given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) for their images to be published.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Example image pairs and results for Photo-to-Photo test.
(a) Representative match pairs (top row) and mismatch pairs (bottom row) from experimental conditions. Targets (left column) were new photos, and these were matched against two-year-old photos (middle column) or official ID photos (right column). (b) Mean accuracy and (c) response time data for passport officers and students in the Photo-to-Photo test. Error bars represent SEM.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Performance on the GFMT as a function of Employment Duration.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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