ISJ hears from Nadav Orbach, Chief Executive Officer, RealSense.
For decades, access control has focused on protecting physical boundaries. Doors, gates and perimeters have defined how organisations secure facilities and manage movement.
But the most important element of security has never been the door itself. It has always been identity.
What has changed is user behaviour. People have become accustomed to using their face as a credential in everyday digital life, a shift sometimes described as the “Apple Effect” on biometrics.
Consumers increasingly expect tech to recognise them instantly and securely, without requiring a password, a badge, a phone tap or another physical object in hand. Today, more than 131 million Americans use facial authentication daily, reinforcing expectations for frictionless identity verification.
This shift is now visible beyond consumer devices. In air travel, biometric journeys have moved from pilot programs into mainstream adoption. IATA reported in late 2025 that 75% of passengers prefer biometrics over traditional passports and boarding passes.
SITA’s 2025 Passenger IT Insights found that nearly seven in ten travellers are comfortable with biometric scanning at airports; more than 60% would choose digital checkpoints. These trends reflect growing acceptance of biometric identity at scale.
Airports show what adoption looks like when convenience, security and throughput all matter at once. Once people experience identity verification that happens in the background, they are less willing to return to queues, credential presentation and stop-and-scan interactions.
That same shift now needs to extend across every modality of entry: speed gates, venues, office buildings, multi-unit residential properties, secure interior doors and any access point that has depended solely on a physical credential.
In practice, that means legacy access control systems will increasingly need to do one of two things.
They will need to be replaced with biometric identity verification to create seamless interactions or they will need to be augmented with biometrics as a second factor to strengthen security at the point of entry.
Historically, the industry has answered core access questions using credentials such as badges, cards, PIN codes or, more recently, mobile devices. Credentials verify what someone carries, not who they are.
As organisations face complex risks and higher expectations for seamless user experiences, attention is shifting toward something more fundamental. Security systems are beginning to verify the person. Biometric authentication is increasingly well suited to this need.
Its role will extend beyond unlocking doors. It is becoming part of the perception layer for physical AI: systems that allow buildings, infrastructure and machines to perceive and respond to people in the physical world.
From checkpoints to continuous identity
Traditional access control systems revolve around a moment of authentication.
A user approaches a door, presents a credential, waits for verification and proceeds. This model worked well when the technology consisted of card readers and keypads. Today it creates friction. It slows movement and introduces opportunities for credentials to be shared, stolen or cloned.
Modern biometric systems are moving beyond this checkpoint model toward continuous identity awareness. Advances in computer vision and edge computing allow systems to authenticate individuals as they move through an environment.
Instead of pausing at a reader, people can be verified while walking through entrances.
Security operates in the background while preserving flow. These capabilities are particularly valuable in high-traffic environments where security must operate at the speed of human movement. Access control is evolving from verifying credentials to understanding identity.
Why privacy will define adoption
Facial authentication has faced scepticism, with much of the concern centring on privacy.
A Pew Research study found that 81% of Americans are concerned about how companies use their data, underscoring why privacy-first architectures are essential for adoption. The pace of adoption will be shaped not only by technological progress, but by how effectively organisations build and maintain trust.
Public concern about personal data is significant. Research cited in the draft from Cisco’s Data Privacy Benchmark Study shows that more than 80% of consumers are concerned about how organisations use their personal data.
Earlier generations of facial recognition systems relied on centralised databases storing biometric images. While convenient for deployment, these architectures introduced new risks. If biometric images were compromised, they could not simply be reset like a password.
The industry is now moving toward privacy-preserving biometric architectures designed to address these concerns. Rather than storing images, modern systems convert facial features into encrypted mathematical representations known as faceprints.
Templates capture unique facial characteristics but cannot be reconstructed into images, reducing privacy risks. These encrypted templates cannot be reverse engineered into an image, addressing a common misconception around facial recognition.
Equally important is where biometric processing occurs. Increasingly, authentication happens directly on the device itself. Sensitive biometric data does not need to be transmitted to the cloud.
This edge-based approach improves security, reduces latency and helps organisations comply with privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation. Privacy-first design is becoming the key enabler that allows biometric technologies to scale globally.
Performance at human speed
In busy environments, authentication delays quickly translate into operational disruptions. Long queues at entry points affect customer experience, employee productivity and even safety during emergencies.
Advances in specialised AI hardware and optimised neural networks have improved the performance of facial authentication systems. Leading platforms now authenticate individuals rapidly while maintaining high true-positive rates with near-zero false acceptance rates.
New enterprise platforms are expanding on-device capacity to support high-throughput environments, with some now capable of identifying a user in roughly 300 milliseconds.
Some systems now achieve true-positive rates above 99.8% with false acceptance rates as low as one in a million, reflecting NIST-validated performance benchmarks.
Equally important are improvements in presentation attack detection, which help prevent attempts to fool biometric systems using photographs, video playback, masks or synthetic media.
For enterprise deployments, advanced anti-spoofing capabilities validated against standards such as ISO 30107-3 Level 2 are quickly becoming a baseline requirement.
The result is tech that can operate reliably across real-world conditions, including crowded entrances, changing lighting environments and diverse populations.
Beyond authentication: Intelligent infrastructure
The same sensors used for authentication can support a broader set of applications. Modern vision platforms can authenticate individuals while also interpreting surroundings.
They can detect multiple people, track movement patterns and analyse posture or behaviour.
This enables capabilities such as tailgating detection at secure entrances, crowd-flow analysis in large venues, safety monitoring and more responsive building operations.
Together, these functions reflect a shift toward intelligent infrastructure. Buildings and public spaces are becoming better able to understand and respond to human activity.
In this context, biometric authentication becomes more than a security feature. It becomes a perception layer for the physical environment. Across industries, facial authentication is moving from pilot programs into critical infrastructure.
Airports, financial institutions and enterprise workplaces are embedding biometric identity verification into everyday operations to reduce friction while maintaining strong security.
Similar shifts are already visible in transportation, where initiatives such as IATA’s One ID program point to a future of more seamless biometric journeys.
This is where the next generation of biometric platforms begins to differ.
Solutions such as RealSense ID Pro extend beyond fast, privacy-preserving authentication to support capabilities such as person detection, pose estimation, skeletal tracking, multi-face detection and anti-tailgating support.
The role of AI in physical security
AI is accelerating this shift. Security systems that once relied on static rules can learn patterns, adapt to changing environments and identify anomalies in real-time. As AI capabilities expand, biometric authentication will increasingly integrate with other sensors and systems.
Video analytics, robotics, building automation and transportation infrastructure will all rely on reliable identity awareness. Instead of verifying identity at a single point, future systems will continuously understand how people interact with spaces. This will improve both safety and operational efficiency.
This direction mirrors broader industry trends.
The Security Industry Association’s 2026 Security Megatrends report points to a market where hardware is being reinvented as intelligent infrastructure, security solutions are losing their traditional boundaries and AI is driving more automated and operationally valuable outcomes across the built environment.
The report highlights that security solutions are losing traditional boundaries and evolving into integrated, AI-driven systems of systems.
The next generation of biometric platforms
Advances in edge computing show how quickly biometric technology is evolving.
Enterprise biometric platforms now support thousands of identities directly on device. Authentication can occur in fractions of a second while maintaining anti-spoofing protections validated through international standards.
Solutions such as the RealSense ID Pro platform illustrate how these capabilities are converging.
Building on earlier generations of facial authentication technology, the platform ensures presentation attack detection and high accuracy, while it expands on-device capacity, improves authentication speed and adds vision AI capabilities designed to support emerging infrastructure applications.
Biometric authentication is moving from isolated access control devices toward integrated perception systems capable of understanding people and environments together.
Trust will shape the future
Despite technical progress, the long-term success of biometric authentication will depend on trust.
Organisations deploying biometric systems must communicate clearly about how data is used, how privacy is protected and how systems are governed. Transparency and responsible implementation will be essential to maintaining public confidence.
When designed responsibly, biometric authentication can strengthen protection while improving user experience. As the world become more interconnected, the ability to verify identity quickly, securely and privately will become a core part of modern infrastructure.
Access control will no longer be defined primarily by the doors we secure. It will be defined by how effectively environments understand and protect the people who move through them. The organisations that succeed will be those that balance security, privacy and user experience as a unified system.
Sources
- Pew Research Center
- U.S. Travel Association
- SITA, Passenger IT Insights
- International Air Transport Association (IATA), One ID Initiative
- U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
- National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT)
- Precedence Research
- Biometric Update
- Microsoft Security
