Participants in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will be among 300,000 attendees to be identified using facial recognition technology, organisers said.
The security system being rolled out across the event’s venues will use technology provided by NEC Corporation, which also provides mugshot-matching software to police forces in the UK.
It will be used to prevent people from stealing access cards and using them to access restricted areas – instead, attendees will need to show that their facial image matches the one shared by the card.
All 300,000 people accredited to attend the event – from athletes and officials through to staff members and media representatives – will have their facial images enrolled in the comparison database.