Title |
Passport Officers’ Errors in Face Matching
|
---|---|
Published in |
PLOS ONE, August 2014
|
DOI | 10.1371/journal.pone.0103510 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
David White, Richard I. Kemp, Rob Jenkins, Michael Matheson, A. Mike Burton |
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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Korea, Democratic People's Republic of | 1 | <1% |
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Demographic breakdown
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Scientists | 10 | 5% |
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 3 | 2% |
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) | 1 | <1% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
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Germany | 1 | <1% |
Italy | 1 | <1% |
Austria | 1 | <1% |
Australia | 1 | <1% |
United Kingdom | 1 | <1% |
New Zealand | 1 | <1% |
Poland | 1 | <1% |
Unknown | 230 | 97% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
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Student > Ph. D. Student | 46 | 19% |
Student > Master | 27 | 11% |
Researcher | 21 | 9% |
Other | 11 | 5% |
Other | 40 | 17% |
Unknown | 41 | 17% |
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Computer Science | 12 | 5% |
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Unspecified | 6 | 3% |
Other | 26 | 11% |
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