Vision-Box?, leader in automated border control systems and electronic identity solutions, has delivered and integrated 35 document readers for manual border control, to the Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service (SEF).

Lisbon Airport, under the close collaboration and control of SEF (Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service), has been a pioneer in implementing modern border control systems, after its introduction of the first facial recognition ABC e-Gates in Europe, in 2008.

Vision-Box has a unique advantage by integrating both manual and automated border control systems under the same unified platform. In addition to the already in production 24 automated border control (ABC) eGates, the new document readers will now allow border guards to tighten control and have a better articulation with the activity taking place at the eGates.

The manual border control?s booths, equipped with the new document readers, will be able to receive transferals from the eGates, allowing the border agent to quickly access the history of what happened at the ABC eGate for a given exception case. By doing so, the benefits are very significant in terms of the quality of service offered, agility and flexibility, as it is now possible to understand the specific contexts on which the border crossings took place in real-time.

The integration between the two will provide border guards an integrated framework that systematically interacts with the different front-end units, enabling the consolidation of both operations and business rules, and generating more accurate and reliable reports.

Miguel Leitmann, Senior Vice President at Vision-Box, highlights the ?advantages gained by this approach in terms of providing travelers with a more positive experience and border guards to have more control over both the manual and automated border control process in an aggregated way, using the same interfaces and reporting console.?

Miguel added ?there is an increasing demand for this type of integration and many of our customers are moving towards this direction; first unifying the airport operations and then expanding the same framework to all entry/exit points including seaports and land borders.?

Vision-Box also recently deployed eGates at the Hamad International Airport in Qatar.

Earlier this year, Vision-Box launched what it was calling a ‘ biometric periscope ,’ for long distance capture of face and iris in self-service eGates. The device is capable of capturing biometrics from a distance of 1 metre.