Research should assess and develop the fit-for-purpose border management of biometric identification modalities beyond fingerprints and facial images, and/or innovative modalities of acquisition of those and other biometrics. Proposed projects should particularly investigate biometrics modalities that currently do not offer satisfactory performance (in terms of accuracy, reliability, usability, minimisation of data protection risk and risk of bias etc.) but potentially offer significant advantages over existing solutions in the short or medium term for applications in a border checks context.

Any innovation in biometrics shall imply clear improvements on acquisition, processing and validation, compared to the state-of-the-art, “on-the-move” (i.e. while the travellers are moving and without cooperation from them), contactless and with stand-off biometric capturing from long-distances (ideally, but not mandatorily, more than 10 meters), and/or of when multiple travellers cross borders, on foot or inside the same vehicle. The solutions should also take into account the different nature and scenarios of BCP operations (e.g. open-air conditions, night, time, time constraints, space constraints, etc.).

The solutions should comply with the requirements of current and foreseen EU large-scale IT systems on borders and visa (e.g. the Entry/Exit System), as well as with interoperability frameworks between EU large-scale IT systems on borders, visas, asylum and migration, as well as on police and judicial cooperation.

The proposed solutions should comply with EU data protection law, and, amongst others, embed data protection by design and by default and ensure transparency vis-à-vis the concerned individuals and avoid abuses of their personal data. The solutions should also meet robust fundamental rights impact assessment frameworks.

The project should also study the stability over time of collected biometrics, and if and how it would be possible to “re-use” collected biometrics in a secure and privacy-friendly manner, for the same purposes and according to allowed uses, collected biometrics, and avoid collecting the same biometrics multiple times.

The proposed solution(s) should address modular integration with health checks – such as in the case of pandemics – as well as checks on people’s temperature. At system-level, emphasis should be given to automated border check for the purpose of guiding travellers on-the-move while performing the seamless biometric acquisition. Systems should also be compatible with policies and measures typically introduced during pandemics (e.g. the use of facemasks and social distancing).

The proposed solutions should include automated decision support systems for the biometric recognition process suggesting to the end-users (border checks operators) which procedure, technology or database can be used without infringing rights of travellers.

Examples of technologies and approaches that can be explored by the research projects include (non-prescriptive and non-exhaustive): 3D facial images, contactless friction-ridge biometrics (i.e. fingerprint, palmprint and finger-knuckle-print), iris recognition from long distances, palm vein, periocular biometrics, novel algorithms embedding artificial intelligence as well as advanced hardware components like sensors, traveller tracking systems for high-quality on-the-move biometric acquisition, safe single wavelength or multispectral light sources (for the illumination of subjects) and document verification subsystems.