The sun has been blamed for performance issues at biometric eGates in the UK's Stansted airport.Lengthy ques at the automated passport control kiosks this week were caused by reflections created by the setting sun, said experts.The passport hall at the airport points west, meaning the facial recognition cameras used for biometric passports face the setting sun in the evening – and leave the devices unable to read travellers' faces.Border force officials at the airport, which is used by more than 23 million passengers each year, were overheard discussing a “high rate of rejection because of the sunlight”, the Guardian reported.Ralph Gross, of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told the newspaper the sun setting behind passengers would pose a challenge for the system's face recognition algorithm.”It's got better at dealing with challenging illumination situations, but it will still struggle in this light. As long as the cameras are set up this way, they are going to struggle with the accuracy rate in this situation,” he said.
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