Japanese industrial giant Panasonic has created a new form of QR code it says will only work on designated devices and environments.

The company revealed the tech yesterday in an announcement of a tweak to its “Site Management Service” access control system that allows and tracks entries to, and exits from, buildings.

Panasonic last year added a cloudy facial recognition service to the product but now feels capturing face scans has become a tiresome bottleneck as workers queue to be photographed, and admins must assess the quality of scans to ensure they’re usable – then possibly capture additional images.

The company’s answer is to issue QR codes that contain registration information and which workers present when they enter a building that uses facial recognition access control. The hardware that makes facial recognition possible of course includes a camera and this system uses it to scan the QR code instead of the face. Panasonic’s cloudy system reads the QR code and, if it finds it contains an authorization to enrol a visitor for facial recognition, conducts the scan and stores it to allow future biometric verifications.

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Any smartphone can read a QR code, posing the risk that a miscreant could use the ones Panasonic issues to try to access buildings they have no business visiting.

Panasonic thought of that and says the QR codes it issues will only work with “identifiable users and devices.”

“While conventional QR codes could be read by general readers, raising concerns that registration information could be viewed by third parties, this system is designed so that identification information can only be viewed in authorized environments, employing a display method that makes the content indistinguishable outside of authorized environments.” Panasonic says it’s applied for a patent for its QR codes.

Using QR codes alongside biometrics is not entirely novel because the technology creates a unique identifier by measuring the distance between facial features. QR codes can represent about 3KB of data. Denso, the Japanese company which invented QR codes, can render a facial profile into that space and offers an identity system based on that ability.

Panasonic is having a busy week on the identity front, as it today announced a collaboration with Hitachi that the two companies hope will enable creation of a secure digital identity that people can use to manage personal data. ®