Force 5 announced the launch of its latest innovation for the Gatekeeper Platform — facial recognition technology. The addition of facial recognition significantly improves identity authentication of the employees, workers, and visitors entering a power utility’s facilities.
Facial recognition is particularly strong in any location where processing physical entry must be self-service, such as unmanned facilities which often comprise 70-90% of a large BES company’s fleet.
Adding the facial recognition technology to the Force 5 Gatekeeper Platform gives customers the ability to rapidly — and with more accuracy — verify the identity of anyone entering any point of entry in which Gatekeeper is installed. This includes corporate HQ, generation sites, unmanned facilities, outdoor call boxes, and PSPs. Facial recognition intake options also reduce a utility’s overhead for credentialing visitors and workers and validating their right of entry.
The Gatekeeper Platform is a powerful risk-reduction solution that drastically reduces the safety, security, and compliance risk that occurs when visitors, contractors, and employees enter a power utility’s facilities. Gatekeeper validates and enforces entry requirements against a BES facility’s watchlists, training requirements, restricted access verification, NERC/CIP visitor-entry and escort requisites, health screening policies — any policy defined.
“We offer the largest group of identifiers on the market. The addition of facial recognition to our biometrics intake accessories strengthens the enforcement of our customers’ entry policies at every location across their company. Some customers are able to now automatically validate and enforce security and safety rules at unmanned sites for the first time,” said Force 5 Vice President James Evelyn.
Compared to manual entry logs and non-bio-identifier tools, facial recognition is a more reliable method of identification validation and enforcement. For example, off-the-shelf visitor management solutions typically include a pre-enrollment-generated QR code for the visitor or worker. This code can be easily passed to another person. Facial recognition eliminates this risk via a unique identifier validation.
Added to the Gatekeeper Platform suite of existing identifiers (badge, QR-code, driver's license, and fingerprint scanners), facial recognition empowers power utilities to rapidly process a high volume of personnel, such as during outages.
Facial recognition technology is the latest innovation being rolled out to all Gatekeeper Platform kiosk appliances, including mounted indoor kiosks, outdoor kiosks with climate protection, and mobile kiosk appliances.
