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Passport officers can be just as good (or bad) as the next person at identifying fake passports, research published on Tuesday reveals. It was carried out in collaboration with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the researchers suggest passports may need to be overhauled to include more than one photo, taken from a different angle, to prevent fakes. The dangers of fake passports were given a face recently in Khaled Sharrouf, 33, whose child was photographed with a severed head of a Syrian solider after he left Australia last year using his brother Mostafa's passport to travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with the terrorist group Islamic State, with his four children in tow. "We already know people have difficulty recognising unfamiliar faces and that is in contrast to faces that are familiar, we are very good at recognising family and friends," said David White from the University of NSW, who is the lead author of the study. But Dr White said they were surprised to find that the passport officers tested accepted fake pictures about one in seven times (about 14 per cent). “Passport officers did not perform better, despite their experience and training," Dr White said. "They made a large number of errors, just like the untrained university students we tested.” The study which began in 2009 and just published in the journal PLOS ONE, has pushed DFAT to implement face-matching aptitude tests as part of the selection process to become a passport officer. The testing was a collaboration with the University of Aberdeen and the University of York in Britain, and was carried out at DFAT's passport office in Sydney. Passports specifications and photo requirements are set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. The authors suggest the single-picture requirement may need to be altered to include a few pictures, taken at different angles, in different lighting and formats. "By providing more than one image we can improve performance," Dr White said. "A single image of a face isn't a very good representation of a person's likeness." Co-author Michael Matheson works for the Australian Passport Office and is based in Canberra.

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