Identity Verification from Photographs in Travel Documents: The Role of Display Duration and Orientation on Performance

Abstract

At border control, it is the personnel's job to identify possible passport fraud, in particular to verify whether the photograph in a travel document matches its bearer. However, as various earlier studies suggest, identity verification from photographs or CCTV is far from accurate. The aim of this study was thus to investigate identity verification at border control. Particularly, we examined the influence of display duration in document verification. Results showed that performance significantly suffered from time restrictions, which stresses the importance of working environments at border control free of time pressure. A second aim was to assess a possible benefit of inversion of the document on identity verification performance, as was suggested by anecdotal evidence from security personnel but clearly contradicts the well known inversion effect in face recognition. Indeed, no such beneficial influence of inversion was found in this study. The results are discussed in terms of application-oriented implications.