Facial recognition to be used on driving licences

The Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is to trial facial recognition technology to weed out duplicate, and potentially fraudulent, photograph driving licence records from its database.

The DVLA will trial automated facial recognition technology on a segment of its database, which altogether holds 20 million photocard driving licence details. It will interrogate the electronic photographs held in the database and check whether there are any duplicates.

A spokeswoman for the DVLA said the trial will test how accurate the technology is at matching photos and that the results will also help assess whether the procedures for renewing driving licences need strengthening.

"The trial will provide an indication of how secure our existing driver licensing procedures are and how accurate our records are," she said.

The technology could also be used to spot instances where existing security checks have been unable to stop someone fraudulently registering more than one licence under different names. Around 1,400 fraudulent applications for driving licences are detected every year by the DVLA, according to figures from UK fraud prevention service CIFAS.

But the DVLA spokeswoman said only when the results of the trial, which is due to last for up to six months, are collated would it be clear whether there were enough instances of fraud to justify the use of the facial recognition technology.

"We aim to confirm that there are no matches within our system. As such, we are unable to say at this stage whether or not there is a need to prevent or crack down [on fraudulent licences]," she said.