AI is revolutionizing the Atlanta airport

For a U.S. citizen arriving in Atlanta these days, there’s a world in which you might not even need to pull out your passport.

The process of a Customs and Border Protection officer manually reviewing American passports at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has been replaced with tablets that capture a passenger’s image and compare it with the government’s image database.

You still need your passport easily accessible. But if there’s no issue, a passenger can now walk through within a few seconds.

Caroline Snead experienced it firsthand on Wednesday after landing back from a trip to Greece.

“It’s a little jarring that you walk up to a computer, it scans your face, and boom, you’re in,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it was “very seamless” and “easy,” she said.

“Enhanced passenger processing” is a major step in a more than decade-long process by the Department of Homeland Security to bring facial recognition technology to its work at the country’s airports.

When it comes to the department’s existing Trusted Traveler and Global Entry programs, upgrades are also in the works, Thomas said.

Within a few weeks, Atlanta’s Global Entry line will have other kinds of camera totems that can capture passengers’ images as they walk by — with no need for them to even stop.

It’s just one of many possible applications of artificial intelligence technology that are being explored at the Atlanta airport, officials tell the AJC.

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Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

‘Enhanced passenger processing’

After 9/11, Congress passed several mandates to try to get the department to record the arrival and departure of non-U.S. citizens by collecting biometrics.

It’s being rolled out even as privacy and immigrant rights advocates have criticized the increased usage. Consumer privacy advocate group EPIC has called facial recognition “inherently dangerous and privacy-invasive surveillance technology that has shown itself to be unreliable and biased.”

The new customs process is for inbound passengers.

For international outbound passengers, biometric totems at gates capture faces in the same way instead of a manual passport check.

An Atlanta airport pilot program with Delta Air Lines dates back to 2016 with an earlier version of this outbound biometric capture, which Delta rolled out at Atlanta gates two years later.

The airport plans to finish installing gate totems at all international gates across all airlines this year, Chris Crist, the airport’s chief information officer, told the AJC.

The new customs process has been operational in Atlanta for about six weeks, Clay Thomas, Customs and Border Protection’s port director in Atlanta, told the AJC. It’s one of about a dozen airports with the technology.

Travelers can choose to opt out of it and see an officer instead.

The system is “far more sophisticated” than the human eye, with a 98% accurate rating, he said. He estimated nationally they’ve seen at least a 15-20% increase in catching impostor passengers with it.

Plus, it lessens the “administrative burden” for officers.

Given the totems are wireless and fairly portable, the team can easily set up more based on the flights and demographics expected.

“It’s also improving the wait times for everybody,” said CBP spokesperson Rob Brisley, by decreasing the need for officer time on most U.S. citizens.

On any given day, 48-52% of Atlanta’s international inbound travelers are U.S. citizens, Thomas said.

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Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

The future

Airlines and the airport itself have helped pay for all these investments, including hardware upgrades for the circuits and server space needed for the new tablets.

Those upgrades have halved the seconds it takes the computer to process each person, Thomas said.

“We want to make the process significantly faster,” Crist said of the investment.

That investment is one of several ways the airport is looking at and making way for AI to improve its operations, he explained at a recent airport professionals conference in Atlanta.

Hartsfield-Jackson is looking to create an in-house chatbot both externally on the airport’s website and internally to help employees, he said.

It’s embarking on a pilot program to explore overlaying computer vision technology onto its security camera system. That could help automate how security professionals sift through footage from the roughly 4,000 cameras across the airport.

“You can think about where this is going, how we can improve security at our airports, how we can improve efficiency in our airports,” he said.

Simultaneously, the airport is investing tens of millions of dollars to nearly double the total number of cameras on site to about 7,000.

The airport is also looking into the possibility of using autonomous vehicles for things like mowing lawns and doing patrols outside of the immediate airport area — and of using AI and predictive analytics for preventive maintenance purposes.

“We want to try to make sure that we’re getting ahead of it and taking advantage of what the technology can provide. But just like anything else, we need to start small,” he said.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Thomas said CBP, as well, is continuing to look for new ways to continue to leverage technology to decrease waiting and lines throughout the process.

Another avenue for improvement they’re exploring is eliminating the need for international passengers to recheck their bags before connecting domestically, he said.

“This is just the beginning. We’re really just capturing what the future of travel modernization looks like,” Thomas said.

Ultimately, Crist told the crowd at the conference he predicts this all could add up to someday, an airport experience feeling more like pre-9/11, before security checkpoints and bag searches.

“You’re going to be able to walk through the facility without having to do a thing. You come in. You go to your gate. You board your plane. You don’t have to stop anywhere.”

But for that to happen, there needs to be a recognition of “who you are as soon as you come into the facility,” Crist said.

“We know why you’re there. We recognize you via computer vision. We recognize the objects you’re holding.”

People will continue to sacrifice privacy for convenience, he predicted.

Snead, the recent college graduate who just used Atlanta’s new customs process, said she thinks people in her generation aren’t as concerned about being surveilled all the time, “because that’s just our life.”

“I would say I would rather trade my privacy for the convenience. I don’t have anything to hide.”