The Department of Homeland Security this year plans to conduct a demonstration of technologies that can remotely identify individuals online to avoid fraud without requiring them to show up in person to conduct transactions such as apply for government services or open a bank account.
“The 2023 Remote Identity Validation Technology Demonstration will challenge industry to demonstrate secure, accurate, and fair remote identity validation technologies that can combat fraud when users apply for government services, open bank accounts, or verify social media accounts,” the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate says on its website.
The demonstration will give S&T an understanding of current performance of remote identity validation technology including with individuals from various demographics, and give industry feedback on their systems.
For the upcoming demonstration, the technologies that S&T will evaluate will use images of documents and people—who would submit selfies—to validate the documents and match them to the person that presented an identity document. The technology will also verify the “liveness” of the selfie images, which would be taken with smartphones and similar devices.
Applications are due Feb. 15 for the document validation track and vendors for this phase will be notified by March 15. Timelines for a match-to-document track for validating images of U.S. driver’s licenses and a face liveness track remain to be determined.
So far, S&T has “received a huge response” for the remote identity demonstration, Arun Vemury, the head of S&T’s Biometric and Identity Technology Center, posted on LinkedIn last week. The demonstration will take place at S&T’s Maryland Test Center near Washington, D.C.
Previously, S&T has hosted annual Biometric Technology Rallies at its test center to evaluate fingerprint, facial recognition and camera technologies, often in checkpoint settings. Those evaluations have helped industry improve their products and DHS components understand what might work best in their operating environments.