According to its official statement, “the Immigration and Border Service (SEF) started this week (12th April) to operate four new generation e-gates at Lisbon Airport, ensuring a faster and more functional border control at arrivals for nationals of the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore.

These new e-gates have a faster and more functional operating system, which allows passports with biometric data to be read more quickly, and are part of a set of 50 that are in operation in all national airports.

The RAPID system enables automated border control, supervised by SEF Inspectors. Automatically, and in less than 20 seconds, the system authenticates the travel document and, through a facial recognition system, compares at the moment the passenger’s face with the photograph registered on the document’s chip through a proprietary algorithm and a technological biometrics solution. After validation of the identification process, which includes a search in international databases, the passenger is authorised to continue his journey.

The new system performs this process in just “one step” and all procedures are performed in a single passenger stop.
In practice, the new e-gates, besides presenting a more modern layout and suitable to the current passenger flow, have some innovative features based on the principles of security, modernisation and interoperability, culminating in a reduction of times in all steps of the process.”

Statement at SEF portal (in Portuguese)