When face-recognition technology was used for the first time to spot known criminals at the Super Bowl this year, civil liberties groups objected. The installation of a similar system in Tampa soon afterward led to street protests.
Joseph Atick, inventor of one technology, acknowledged that the controversy was so intense this summer, he was concerned that his creation, in the wrong hands, might "evolve into the realization of Big Brother."
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The criticism has faded since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Airport authorities are rushing to test and deploy the systems, which couple cameras and databases with digital images. The leading makers of face-recognition systems -- Atick's Visionics Corp. and Viisage Technology -- are battling fiercely to control a new market.
Each company promotes its product as a technological leap beyond passwords and personal identification numbers for security and authentication to fight terrorism, identity theft and other kinds of crimes.
As their stock prices soar, the companies' officials crisscross the country to meet with aviation, defense and immigration officials. They also are lobbying Congress and watching each other closely.
When testers of a new system at Fresno Yosemite International Airport in California found bugs in Viisage software last week, Visionics quickly offered its product.
Soon after, Viisage representatives met with executives of T.F. Green Airport in Rhode Island -- and figured they had a deal -- Visionics officials got a foot in the door. They'll make their pitch in two weeks.
In Boston, officials at Logan International Airport announced that Viisage and Visionics will compete in a test-run later this year, an exercise that one insider described as a high-tech bake-off. Other major airports, including Denver, San Francisco and Reagan National, are considering the products, industry officials said.
"They think that we are the enemy, we're the one to beat," said Viisage chief Thomas Colatosti, who accused Visionics of being too aggressive. "They get into this PR stuff, this 'Spy vs. Spy.' "
Atick played down any rivalry. "The opportunity here is bigger than both of us combined," he said. "May the best technology win."
Atick envisions a "national shield" of face-recognition systems linked to government databases filled with images of known terrorists. "I'm confident we have a technology that's a quantum leap ahead of our competitors," he said.
Wartime has always proven to be a boon for some industries, and the unconventional war now being waged on terrorism is no exception. Entrepreneurs have pitched products for sterilizing suspicious mail, scanning luggage and inoculating against biological attacks.
Industry analysts said the attacks probably accelerated by years the public's adoption of face recognition and other biometric systems that rely on immutable human features.
The biometrics industry is expected to grow from about $200 million in revenue this year to about $2 billion in 2004, said Brian Ruttenbur, an equity analyst at Morgan Keegan & Co. Face-recognition systems could sell for as much as $2 million each at scores of airports, said Richard Ryan, an analyst at Dougherty & Co.
Archrivals Visionics and Viisage are similar in many respects. Both have received contracts and funding from the Defense Department, the National Security Agency and other government agencies. They both sell products to secure facilities, book prisoners and authenticate the identities of computer or ATM users.
The systems work in different ways, but the general idea is the same. The Visionics system, for instance, creates a digital map of an individual's face, translating the contours into mathematical formulas that the company says are nearly as distinguishing as a fingerprint. The software then compares faces captured by a video camera against images stored in a database. At an airport, a match would sound an alarm, prompting security officials to investigate.
The stock of both companies has skyrocketed since the attacks. Viisage jumped from $1.94 a share on Sept. 10 to $13.80 yesterday. Visionics shares rose from $4.27 to $15.86. The stock price of Imagis Technologies, a smaller Canadian company that also produces face-recognition systems, has more than tripled.
Many people have said in surveys since the attacks that they would be willing to trade some privacy for security. But privacy advocates say that once face-recognition equipment is in place, authorities will want to expand its uses to find criminals, debtors and scofflaws as well as terrorists.
Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said: "The designers of these systems will not be in control of how they are deployed. It will be set by government policy, by legislation. It is very difficult for government to resist expanding it to other uses."
"It's just human nature, when you have a tool that can be used lots of different ways, to make the most of the money you have already spent," said Michael Froomkin, a professor and privacy specialist at the University of Miami School of Law.
Critics cite evidence that the systems are not always accurate.
A company that provides video components for the systems in Fresno warned that tests have shown that Viisage and Visionics systems don't always match the faces of people against the images in databases.
"This new technology is not as precise as fingerprints and will, even when working optimally, produce occasional 'false positives' which can be easily resolved by local authorities," Pelco, of Clovis, Calif., said in a statement issued several days ago.
"We will not overstate what this technology can do," Pelco's president and chief executive, David McDonald, said in an interview. "We cannot mislead the public that it's fail-safe. It's not."
Of Atick's "Big Brother" qualms, McDonald said the technology can help the country as long as it is used under strict guidelines that protect innocent people from being included in the databases or watched without their permission.
Atick said his systems are designed so the images of passersby are not added to the database.
"I want to make sure this serves a real purpose, to make travel safer," Atick said.
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
