Airport E-Gate Pre-Registration System

The problem

Automated border gates at international airports usually rely on e-passports. Travellers without one can't use them.

What it does

A secure, multi-role platform where travellers register their biometrics ahead of time, so they can clear an automated gate on arrival without an e-passport.

How it works

I built the Fingerprint Verification Module:

• A guided capture flow in React that walks the traveller through each step — right hand, left hand, then thumbs.
• A Spring Boot microservice that orchestrates fingerprint enrolment and one-to-one verification.
• A pluggable matching layer that can use either a custom OpenCV/Python minutiae-extraction engine or the SourceAFIS library.

All traffic between services goes through a JWT-secured API gateway.

Decisions

The matching engine is swappable, using the Strategy pattern. Both engines sit behind the same interface, and which one runs is a configuration setting. The rest of the module never knows which engine it's talking to, so the two can be compared, or one replaced, without touching enrolment or verification.

Fingerprints are stored as templates, never as images. PostgreSQL holds the mathematical template extracted from each print, not the picture of it. The database never contains a copy of anyone's actual fingerprint.