ODYSSEUS Project – Innovative Solutions to Enhance the Security of EU Borders

This development is part of the ODYSSEUS project that has received funding from European Union’s Horizon Europe Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement N°101073910

Overview:
Recent estimates from the World Economic Forum suggest that transnational travel will increase by 50% over the next ten years, reaching 1.8 billion arrivals by 2030. With increasing travel on land and sea, delays and queues at border crossings are common, causing frustration for citizens and burdening border staff. In Europe, airports have somewhat improved border crossing with facial recognition booths for European citizens with RFID-enabled passports, but significant queues remain. For non-European citizens, the situation is worse. Border control for land and sea relies heavily on staff to check passports and control luggage, leading to delays and queues even without many travellers. Solutions are required that further develop on the technologies deployed at airports to bring seamless travel experiences at all borders.

At the same time, the need to maintain physical and fiscal security at the border is paramount; preventing the entry of illicit and harmful materials across borders. Manual inspections of vehicles and baggage at the border is time consuming and impactful on the quality of the border crossing experience for passengers. Such a problem necessitates the use of high-speed, targeted detection solutions based on the latest technological advancements in through-barrier inspection.

The ODYSSEUS Project:
ODYSSEUS is an EU-funded HORIZON Innovation Action project. The project aims to combine multiple technologies into a single, seamless border-crossing scenario that allows EU and non-EU citizens to travel across borders with minimal disruption, while reducing the workload for Border Authorities. The highly secure and automated border check solution, based on novel digital technologies, will strengthen border controls by fusing multiple identity verification and cargo screening solutions, generating risk information for each vehicle and passenger, to facilitate Border Authorities.

The consortium comprises 14 partners from across the Europe, including 4 Border Agencies. The consortium is in the second year of collaboration, advancing its value proposition through 6 multidisciplinary work packages that will ultimately culminate in the delivery of 3 real life, operational scenarios at land, sea and train borders, comprising multiple pilots in several locations within the EU. The outcome of each pilot will inform on a number of recommendations for future borders security operations to enhance the experience and safety of the border crossing scenario for passengers.

The Approach:
The core of the ODYSSEUS platform lies in its data collection and management layer, where identity and other travel-relevant data are received from travellers before their journey. Upon arrival at the border, vehicle, luggage, and cargo analytics are collected and processed to ensure no illegal or illicit goods are detected. By interconnecting with existing legacy systems like AFIS, ABIS, and EES, ODYSSEUS computes a risk score for each passenger and vehicle, allowing seamless border crossing or alerting Border Authorities for deeper inspection based on the analytics and risk score. User-friendly interfaces connect processed data and extract knowledge with Border Authorities to easily identify cases of identity fraud, smuggling, and human trafficking.

The platform consists of two core elements: identity verification and the screening of vehicles, luggage, and cargo. These elements are fused to decide whether passengers/vehicles can pass the border without stopping or require deeper inspection. Before arriving at the border, travellers download a universal mobile app to manage the identity verification process. A seamless onboarding process enables citizens to verify their identity through an ePassport with High Level of Assurance based on eIDAS, using Optical Character Recognition, NFC-based passport information retrieval, AI-powered liveness detection, face detection, and matching. The passport is stored and uploaded as a Virtual Passport, enabling secure management of identity information through a smartphone, creating a Mobile Passport. Health certificates for COVID-19 vaccination or negative tests, along with visa documents, are also uploaded to the mobile app. All information is stored in a secure eWallet, powered by DLT, validated through external APIs with legacy systems, while behavioural verification runs continuously in the background, analyzing mobile behavioural patterns to ensure that only the legitimate owner can access the eWalle.. This authentication combines over 14 independent behavioural traits, including movement, device usage, biometrics, and transactional patterns, to continuously verify the user.

As the passenger/vehicle approaches the border, UAVs scan the vehicles using thermal cameras to count passengers and assess stress/anxiety conditions. High-resolution cameras perform face recognition and capture images of license plates and vehicles to detect changes. Upon closer arrival, unobtrusive X-Ray scanning detects potential illegal/illicit goods. High-resolution cameras perform face recognition of passengers or travellers approaching the border. The Faceless Person Counting solution measures the number of people in the vehicle. All information is sent to the ODYSSEUS platform for processing and fusion through the Decision Support System (DSS), generating an overall score for the passenger/vehicle. If no risk is detected, the passenger/vehicle crosses the border seamlessly. If a risk is detected, they are directed to a deeper inspection lane. Border Authorities are informed about the risk factors through a unique user interface, facilitating the control process.

Border Security Technology Development for vehicle inspection.

X-ray inspection of privately owned vehicles
ODYSSEUS will deliver a world-class solution for occupied vehicle inspection, identifying threats and contraband without interrupting traffic. It uses state-of-the-art algorithms to detect anomalies and facilitate fast inspection. The occupied vehicle inspection solution combines patented temporal X-ray backscatter and transmission imaging technologies to provide detailed images of vehicle contents without manual inspection. Transmission X-ray imaging classifies materials into organic, inorganic, and metallic, while backscatter X-ray identifies organic materials like explosives, drugs, and people. The ODYSSEUS X-ray imaging solution offers ultra-low doses (less than 0.1uSv per scan), far below the ANSI N42.46 limit of 0.25uSv, ensuring safety without compromising image quality or detection rates.

UAV assisted vehicle scanning based on thermal and high-resolution cameras
As security demands at BCP escalate, the need for advanced technologies like UAVs has become crucial in ensuring thorough and efficient inspections. The ODYSSEUS UAV, equipped with both high-resolution and thermal cameras, offers a novel solution for pre-scanning vehicles before they enter secured zones. The high-resolution cameras enable accurate license plate recognition and detection of potential vehicle modifications, making the technology particularly valuable for frequent travellers. Meanwhile, thermal imaging plays a critical role in detecting passengers who haven’t registered in the ODYSSEUS platform prior to arrival, especially at night or in low-visibility conditions. By adapting these scanning technologies to the UAV platform and processing data on board and in real time, this solution ensures both efficient and comprehensive inspections. The synergy between the onboard processor and these camera systems enhances surveillance, with high-resolution imaging excelling in daylight and thermal cameras providing critical support in low-light scenarios, significantly improving security and operational efficiency at border crossings. UAV-assisted scanning represents a broader trend toward automation and advanced data processing in border security, reducing reliance on manual inspections and enabling faster, more reliable threat detection.

Seamless Identity Verification at border crossing – the Odysseus Platform
The core of the ODYSSEUS platform consists of generic services such as data storage, a decision support system service based on machine learning with Explainable AI (XAI), connectors to data collecting services, and flexible integration with any provider of the service of a given type. The platform implements border crossing flows for travellers and provides a portal for traveller self-service. It enables the communication between processes and services, corelates the tasks and give real time information to the users.

Digital and Virtual Passport
ODYSSEUS aims to leverage existing virtual passport implementations in counties like Australia, aiming to gather information from passports stored in the cloud, alongside biometric identifiers, which gives Australian citizens the opportunity for document-free travel between Australia and New Zealand. With support from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) digital travel credentials are rapidly becoming a hot topic, and support the requirement to address seamless border crossing scenarios, by removing the need for passengers to carry their passports on them. ODYSSEUS will deliver the means for citizens to manage their appropriate Digitial travel credentials through a dedicated mobile App that will be used as a self-sovereign identity token of the user and an access credential for cloud counterpart of the DTC.

AI-powered Continuous Behavioural Verification
Behavioural Verification is an AI-powered security solution that continuously analyses a traveller’s unique mobile behaviour, such as typing speed, swipe gestures, device holding, and location patterns, to confirm their identity while using their DTC mobile app. Unlike passwords or PINs, which can be easily compromised, Behavioural Verification is challenging to replicate because it relies on behavioural patterns unique to each person, making them difficult to mimic. Also, unlike the one-off protection barrier of passwords, Behavioural Verification system continuously authenticates users in the background. Within ODYSSEUS this technology is used it ensure enhanced security of the DTC wallet that carries the travel credentials, allowing travellers to pass through borders seamlessly without manual identity checks and stronger security.

Faceless GDPR Compliant Travellers Counting
The Faceless GDPR compliant travellers’ counting component is designed to monitor different areas and provide relevant alerts and metrics. In restricted areas, it detects human presence and raises alerts for border authorities, while in travellers’ used areas, it estimates crowd-related metrics. The system is composed of several key components:

1. Crowd counting: Estimates the population in a specific area and sending notifications to the Decision Support System (DSS).
2. Object detection: Identifies abandoned objects and notifies the DSS.
3. Human presence in restricted areas: Detects unauthorized presence in specific areas and sends alerts to the DSS.

Despite of the diversity of the above-mentioned components they share the same architecture, with the distinction being the algorithms used for detection. A camera, either existing CCTV or newly installed, monitors the area, and a computational unit processes the video to generate the required metrics. These results are sent to the ODYSSEUS platform through an asynchronous communication channel. The DSS ‘consumes’ the data (messages or alerts) for risk assessment evaluation, while border officers are taking the final decisions, avoiding false alerts, confusion, unpleasant interactions between guards and individuals and crowd control problems.

Multi-Modal Fusion and Decision Support System
The Decision Support System (DSS) at the core of ODYSSEUS assists practitioners in making risk-based, privacy-enhanced, and security-related decisions based on customizable preferences and historical data. It provides automated recommendations for systematic border checks, including identity, health, and security checks, facilitating travel for bona fide travellers, continuous border surveillance, situational awareness, and combating identity and document fraud. Leveraging seamless identity verification, secure DLT virtual passports, continuous behavioural authentication, unobtrusive X-Ray screening, UAV-assisted cameras, and faceless person counting, ODYSSEUS offers a fused multi-modal risk estimation for travellers and vehicles. The DSS follows the AI as a Service (AIaaS) paradigm, ensuring transparency and fairness through explainable AI (XAI).

X-AI for Privacy and Trust Enhancement
The AI components in ODYSSEUS raise questions about the fairness and transparency of DSS recommendations. The XAI module will ensure recommendations are understandable for Border Authorities, security practitioners, LEAs, and researchers. It addresses technical and human challenges, making AI decisions transparent and interpretable. The XAI module will remove bias, ensuring fairness through continuous evaluation and using unbiased datasets. Extensive testing will further eliminate bias, enhancing trust in AI-driven decisions.

Pilots:
The ODYSSEUS platform and its technologies will be demonstrated through comprehensive scenarios and validation campaigns. Demonstrations in real-life settings will showcase improvements in border crossing experiences, such as non-stop travel, no queues, and secure document storage. For Border Authorities, benefits include reduced workload, fewer random inspections, and enhanced intelligence on risky travellers and vehicles. Validation campaigns will highlight significant improvements in traveller experience and intelligence for Border Authorities, derived from multiple identity verification technologies and multi-modal screening. Pilots will be conducted at land and sea borders, on roads, onboard ships, and inside trains. An agile approach with two iterations will incorporate feedback and best practices. After each pilot cycle, a thorough assessment will validate the Technology, Societal, Operational, and Legal Readiness Levels and evaluate user acceptance. Training curricula will be provided to LEAs and Forensic Institutes to enhance their operational capabilities.

IMPACT:
The ODYSSEUS project will focus on a holistic solution that delivers impact across multiple, user-centred capabilities. These aim to increase the detection and awareness level at border crossings, by minimizing required user interventions whilst minimizing the risk of data privacy breaches. Three key impacts are targeted within the project:

1. Improved border crossing experience for travellers and border authorities’ staff, while maintaining security and monitoring of movements across air, land and sea EU external borders, supporting the Schengen space, reducing illegal movements of people and goods across those borders and protecting fundamental rights of travellers.
2. Improved security of EU land and air borders, as well as sea borders and maritime environment, infrastructures and activities, against accidents, natural disasters and security challenges such as illegal trafficking, piracy and potential terrorist attacks, cyber and hybrid threats.
3. Improved customs and supply chain security through better prevention, detection, deterrence and fight of illegal activities involving flows of goods across EU external border crossing points and through the supply chain, minimising disruption to trade flows.

CONCLUSION
The ODYSSEUS Project aims to enhance EU border security by integrating advanced technologies for seamless and secure border crossings. It combines identity verification, cargo screening, and risk assessment to facilitate efficient travel while maintaining high security standards. The project involves multiple pilots across land, sea, and train borders, with a focus on improving the traveller experience and operational efficiency for Border Authorities. Please register interest with the ODYSSEUS stakeholder Community here:
https://lnkd.in/dVtANGZG