ME Group photobooths receive Biometrics Presentation Attack Detection compliant accreditation

ME Group photobooths receive Biometrics Presentation Attack Detection compliant accreditation ME Group’s liveness detection technology is recognised by leading French technology evaluation laboratory CLR in the bid to end photobooth presentation attacks

24 February 2022 (Grenoble, France): ME Group, the global leader in instant service vending equipment, today announces that its liveness detection technology has been recognised as compliant under international Biometrics Presentation Attack Detection standards (ISO/IEC 30107-3) by the French biometrics and security technologies experts at Cabinet Louis Reynaud Labs (“CLR Labs”).

This accreditation is a key achievement and provides further evidence of the Group’s security and industry-leading technology across its photobooth estate, which effectively detects and prevents potential biometric presentation attacks.

The prevention of presentation attacks within photobooths is an essential process to mitigate and eliminate the creation of real “fake” official identity documents. One of the main methods of attackers is to present a picture or a screen of a morphed picture. This allows two different persons to be matched at automatic border controls, against the picture printed or stored in the chip of an official travel document.

Testing of ME Group’s photobooths commenced in September 2021 and involved several thousand different presentation attacks being performed on the biometric data of real subjects, over a wide demographic range.

All presentation attacks on photobooths were detected by the Group’s liveness detection system during the evaluation period. Subsequently, as according to ISO /IEC JTC1 SC37-30107-3 terminology, an APCER of 0% was recorded.

In less than half a second, ME Group’s liveness detection system performs a 3D capture of the biometric data to confirm that no presentation attack has been implemented. At the same time, a complementary high-quality ICAO-compliant portrait capture is performed, which guarantees, with no ambiguity, that the subject’s biometric data has not been changed or altered during the liveness detection sequence. This system offers a very low BPCER (i.e. low false rejection), to give a better experience to every single end user, even if not familiar with the digitalisation process. This robust system recognises all complex Deepfake videos which attempt to simulate a real person.

This innovative and robust liveness detection system, with patent pending, has been designed by ME Group at its innovation centre located in the French Tech district of the Alpes in Grenoble.

Christian Croll, Biometric and 3D Expert at ME Group, said:
“Our liveness detection technology has been specially designed for the highly controlled lighting environment of a photo booth, helping to ensure that our products are the most biometrically secure they can be. It offers a smart experience to the end user as it does not require any action from them, by incorporating a convenient smart passive liveness detection mode.”

Stéfane Mouille Director of the CLR Labs, said:
“Preventing morphing presentation attacks is at the top of the European political agenda. The European Commission is updating its electronic passport legislation to introduce the upcoming European standards published by the CEN/CENELEC and we are honoured and proud that ME Group has selected our laboratory to perform its evaluation.”

Notes to Editors

About ME Group

ME Group is the global leader in instant service vending equipment. It is a prominent international player in the photobooth and integrated biometric identification solutions market, with an established network of more than 28,000 photobooths across 18 countries offering market-leading photographic quality and technology.

In 1954, the first customer sat inside one of our photobooths to have their photograph taken and, amazingly for that time, a few minutes later walked away with their pictures. In 1962, Photo-Me International Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange, where it continues to trade today.

Since then, hundreds of millions of people throughout the world have used our photobooth images for official documents, such as passports and driving licenses, and for fun.

Today, the Group offers an extensive and diverse range of products and services, reaching far beyond its photobooth heritage, including automated 24/7 laundry services, printing kiosks, and vending equipment for the food service market.

About ME Group photobooths & technology

ME Group holds patents on photobooth technology for the optimization of perfect diffuse and ICAO compliant illumination and has designed dedicated camera and image processing to achieve a high level of quality and reproducibility of ICAO portraits. It has also developed advanced patented technology for 3D portraits to anticipate high performance of face recognition and liveness detection.

All this expertise has been designed into the preparation of the next generation of high level of electronic authentication requested by PVID defined by ANSSI, by e-IDAS and by the European digital ID wallet.

ME Group provides solutions to corporates and institutions seeking to improve and digitalise security ID to combat fraud and security threats. It also has agreements in place with governments for the direct and secure upload of photographs from photo booths to their servers for issuing official identity documents.

The photo booth estate is supported, maintained and upgraded by our 650-strong network of skilled field engineers and monitored 24/7 by interconnected remote telemetry.

ME Group and its worldwide subsidiaries have an active participation in several European and international standards, and have done so for several years, by being editor and co-editor on biometric 2D and 3D face standards. For example in 2018, ME Group developed a face acquisition bench for the ISO to analyse distance influence on face matching algorithms.

Website: www.me-group.com