GAME FACES

Facial authentication technology is speeding up the fan entry process, but don’t confuse it with facial recognition technology.

By Michael Popke

In July 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the National Football League’s Cleveland Brown’s contacted Sanjay Manandhar with a very important question: Can you help implement a touchless, convenient, fast and safe entry experience at FirstEnergy Stadium for ticketholders during the 2020 season?

“We knew we could,” says Manandhar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Wicket, a facial authentication technology and computer vision analytics company that previously was focused on corporate environments.

And, indeed, they did. The Browns tested the Wicket system’s ability to accurately identify ticketholders — even if they were wearing a facemask, hat or sunglasses — during the 2020 season and continued the opt-in service via Express Access in 2021 and 2022 as part of the team’s “Responsible Restart Plan.” To enroll, fans log in to their ticketing account, upload a selfie and enter the stadium through an Express Access gate. They can keep their phones in their pocket and instead just give a quick glance to a screen. One selfie allows access for everyone in the ticketholder’s party, which is proving to be a boon for families with children.

According to StadiumTechReport.com, as many as 6,000 fans — or 10 percent of the stadium’s capacity — were using facial authentication as of December 2022. What’s more, fans who opt in for the technology don’t change their mind and later opt out, according to Manandhar.

“Nobody says, ‘I waited in line 45 minutes last weekend, but yesterday it took me 300 milliseconds to get in. That was too easy; let me go back and wait 45 minutes again next time,’” he says.

Other NFL, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball stadiums are experimenting with facial authentication technology, too, in various ways. For example, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United FC, debuted Express Entry in 2022 using Wicket technology for season ticket holders at a limited number of gates. It is part of the venue’s evolving “frictionless” gameday-operations dynamics — from cashless transactions to checkout-free concessions to touchless screening.

“Over the past three to four years, we’ve accelerated the screening process from the old walk-through machines to the next-generation [touchless screening] gates,” says Joe Coomer, vice president of security for AMB Sports & Entertainment, which is part of the Blank Family of Businesses that include Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Falcons and United FC. “The backup has been the ticketing scan. Now, that is fixed. I don’t know why this type of product is not in every facility.”

As of late March, about 10,000 fans had signed up to use Express Entry, which is still in the pilot stage. Coomer says more big-picture testing is required, such as how the facial authentication system will respond when requiring access to large ticketholder groups with, say, 100 people or more.

(Another pilot program underway at an AMB training facility involves using Wicket’s facial authentication for players and personnel to enter limited-access areas — a natural development, given that the company’s roots are in software that uses facial technology to replace keycards for unlocking doors. “A key card is actually insecure, because you can give me your keycard, and I can go in as you. But really it was me, not you,” Manandhar says. “It’s harder for you to give me your face.”)

Coomer is confident the technology works — “I’m starting to trust it more and more, and our success rate is about 99.3 percent,” he says — while also recognizing that facial authentication might not be for all fans. The fan base for Atlanta United FC skews younger, for example, and that team’s supporters were initially less hesitant than some Falcon fans to give Express Entry a try, according to Coomer.

“We haven’t limited anyone’s ability to enter,” he says. “We haven’t forced this. Fans have the option to either enroll or not enroll, and we’ve got signage in place. Fans know which way to go based on their option.”

Use Correct Terminology

The term “facial authentication” has become erroneously synonymous at times with the term “facial recognition.” But there are critical differences between the two technologies.

“Facial authentication is a 1:1 (one-to-one) mechanism,” notes a blog post on Wicket’s website. “This…works to exclusively match the face in the camera feed to a previously provided image from a user of the authentication tech. Not only does this protect individual user privacy by requiring opt-in, but the format reduces the risk of false positives and false negatives by nature — since the source image has to be a high-quality, clearly visible image of the user.”

On the other hand, facial recognition uses a one-to-many mechanism that compares and matches a single face in a crowd to a human face that has been previously provided. “To further simplify this,” Wicket’s blog states, “facial recognition uses a camera to run an image through a large database of faces to look out for” and can be used for surveillance and security purposes, such as finding individuals in a crowd.

Another term for “facial authentication,” according to Brian Finch, a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Show Pittman LLP, is “facial validation.”

“Generally, people aren’t going to agree to use facial recognition technology, like they agree to use Face ID on their phone or actively opt-in to facial verification for fast access into a stadium,” Finch says, adding that facial recognition technology raises greater privacy and discrimination concerns. The image of an individual’s face then can be matched against, say, a database of known criminals or a terrorist watch list, he says, cautioning that “facial recognition and identification context alone is insufficient to justify an arrest.”

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Last year, The New York Times reported on an “attorney exclusion list” created by MSG Entertainment, which owns Madison Square Garden (home of the NBA’s New York Knicks and the National Hockey League’s New York Rangers), that allows security personnel to use facial recognition technology to identify and flag down attorneys in MSG Entertainment venues.

“The company says ‘litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment’ and so it is enforcing the list with the help of computer software that can identify hundreds of lawyers via profile photos on their firms’ own websites, using an algorithm to instantaneously pore over images and suggest matches,” the newspaper reported. “Facial recognition technology is legal in New York, but lawyers have sued MSG Entertainment, saying the exclusion list is forbidden. The use of facial recognition technology to enforce it has raised an outcry not just from people turned away from Knicks games, but from civil liberties watchdogs, who called it a startling new frontier that demonstrated why the federal government should regulate the technology. The local grudge match has become part of a national debate over the specter of a privatized surveillance state.”

“The accuracy of the software can vary significantly — because there are lots of different software providers out there — and so can the quality of the images that are captured, and there’s a chance for misidentification,” Finch adds. “A much greater chance than in the validation scenario where you’re just unlocking your phone. There are examples where the software that is being used to match the captured image vs. the stored image may have biases [such as] not being able to match up certain racial groups and genders accurately. The widely used example is that African American faces may not match as well or as accurately as white faces. And so, as a result, there’s a greater chance that an African American face that has been captured may be mismatched. I think that is what is concerning [about] the wide use of facial recognition at sports facilities.”

“That’s why we call it facial authentication,” Manandhar says. “We stay away from ‘facial recognition,’ because of the surveillance connotation. We’re a privacy-first company, and I’m a privacy nut. I do not want people doing stuff to me that I don’t know about.”

Finch urges venue operators implementing facial authentication technology to make a major effort to quell any potential confusion and concern from the get-go.

“You want to be very clear with respect to what you’re using, for what purposes and who is impacted by this identification — rather than just saying, ‘Hey, we use facial recognition to ensure the safety and security of our patrons and our employees,’” he says.

The software used for facial authentication and facial recognition differs, too, according to Finch. “In both circumstances, it’s matching against a specific image or a collection of images, but the one-to-many [application, which is facial recognition], obviously, has a far more complicated algorithm, and there are more opportunities for it to produce a mismatch than the oneto-one identification software,” he says.

“You want to be very clear with respect to what you’re using, for what purposes and who is impacted by this identification — rather than just saying, ‘Hey, we use facial recognition to ensure the safety and security of our patrons and our employees.’”

BRIAN E. FINCH

Facial authentication also takes place at kiosks outside the venue, while facial recognition typically involves surveillance cameras.

Operators of venues such as FirstEnergy Stadium and Mercedes-Benz Stadium are effectively communicating the benefits of facial authentication technology to their teams’ fan bases, and it’s clear demand exists for an even more frictionless and streamlined fan experience.

Coomer notes that people increasingly are using their face for everything from accessing their personal devices to boarding commercial airplanes, and he envisions the technology working for transactions at concessions stands and merchandise booths, as well as potentially even for age-verification purposes when purchasing alcohol at venues.

Additionally, Finch thinks facial authentication systems could work at large high school football stadiums, especially because students most likely already have an identification photo that can be used for fast and easy access. “Some of those schools where you’re attracting thousands if not 10,000-plus to a game? Why not?” he says. “I think this is definitely more than a niche technology at this point, but it’s certainly not widespread, either. It has momentum, let’s put it that way.”

Manandhar is even more optimistic “This is the future,” he declares, predicting that the field of facial authentication technology providers will expand quickly. “In five years, 80 percent of professional sports facilities will be doing this.” l