A passport fraud study that pitted passport staff who are naturally good at face recognition against other passport officers and the general public has found that the former were easily superior at spotting impersonation attempts.Conducted by the University of New South Wales, the study was based on the results of experiments using students, passport officers and face-matching experts at the Australian Passport Office who are known as "super-recognisers" for their innate facial matching capabilities. The study was published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.All were asked to detect passport fraud using automatic face recognition software.One experiment compared the performance of student participants to trained passport officers-who use the system in their daily work-and found equivalent performance in these groups. However, the group of highly trained and experienced "facial examiners" outperformed these groups by 20 percentage points.Students and non-experts passport officers made errors 50 per cent of the time when determining whether a face was on the list of candidates or not."Our research shows that accuracy can be significantly improved by recruiting staff who are naturally good at face recognition – the so-called "super-recognisers" – and then giving them in-depth training in the use of the software," study lead author and UNSW psychologist Dr David White told Phys.org."It is encouraging that specialist facial examiners performed far better than the untrained students and the non-specialist passport officers," he said.

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