July 10, 2025
We are excited to announce that from September 2025 we will be introducing Facial Recognition as a fast and straightforward payment experience for school meals. It is important to us that everyone in our school community, including parents/carers and students, are well informed about this new development and have all the information needed before opting to use this new service.
Why?
Facial Recognition offers a quick and secure way for students to purchase school meal items without needing cash. It is also quicker than finger biometrics, which is our current system. Facial Recognition will speed up the break and lunchtime service with a contactless point-of-sale experience.
How?
Students simply choose their meal, look at the checkout camera, and proceed with a quick and secure point-of-sale experience. An image of the face is captured, and the software turns unique features of the face geometry, such as the distance between the eyes and the distance from the top of the forehead to the chin, to create a unique identifier for each student.
Transaction process at work-
CONSENT: Students must opt-in to use Facial Recognition before an image is taken. If students do not consent to using the software, the till operator cannot activate the Facial Recognition process. Like all biometric recognition methods, Facial Recognition requires consent. Please give consent through the Arbor app.
- CAPTURE: The biometric system captures an image of the student’s face.
- COLLECTION: The system reads distinctive features from the image and processes it through an algorithm.
- IDENTIFICATION: During checkout, the cashier initiates the system to verify their account and process the transaction.
Further information can be found in the School Catering section of the website.
The graphical elements used in this post are free downloads from www.freepik.com