Check out how the SMILE solution works improving border control!

SMILE Action is a Horizon 2020 project receiving funding by the European Union Research and Innovation Programme on the topic “Towards reducing the cost of technologies in land border control applications” and is part of the Work Programme ” Secure societies – Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens”.

The project’s duration is 36 months, from July 2017 to June 2020. The SMILE consortium consists of two academic institutes, two research institutes, one major digital security industry, five Small Medium Enterprises and four Law Enforcement Agencies, from eight European countries.

SMILE project intends to improve the flow of travellers crossing European land borders by increasing the speed of checking process based on the SMILE pre-registration feature. To this end, we develop a context-aware biometric authentication framework for optimising a multimodal verification process under varying contexts.

SMILE will use the concept of pre-registration, which is similar to air travel check-in. Travellers will provide their information before their arrival at the Border Crossing Point. Subsequently, the SMILE system will check the collected data offline. At the same time, it will receive information from national and international databases. If no alerts occur, the travellers will be allowed to go through the fast lane where an officer will perform a final identification.

To this end, we have envisaged a palette of low-cost technological solutions such as (i) a mobile border control device, (ii) hard and soft biometrics modules, (iii) a gateway at the BCPs, (iv) mobile/web application for travellers, and (v) a private cloud infrastructure.

Our vision

Our ultimate goal is to make the land border control less resource-intensive, while in sync will contribute to the travellers’ convenience without sacrificing security from unwanted entrants. Regardless of this goal, we ensure that SMILE system fully complies with all EU regulations concerning border control, data protection and human rights.