Alton Towers will move all DigiPass customers to an automated photo recognition system in 2021.
Instead of customers having a card or wristband to scan and receive their on-ride photos from a counter, the new system will require customers to provide a photo of themselves which will then be used to automatically match on-ride photos with their account.
Intended to simply and speed up the process of acquiring on-ride photos, the change to the system comes from the purchase of Picsolve by Pomvom, who specialise in image recognition.
Concerns over privacy and photos being associated to the wrong account is addressed by Picsolve, who say that whilst the chance of this happening is low, users should report photos that are not theirs. This reporting will remove the unwanted photos from the customer's account, whilst also updating the systems learning algorithm to further reduce the likelihood of false identifications.
Questions remain over how reliable the system will be in identifying customer photos, especially with on-ride photos where lighting conditions are frequently unfavourable and that for at least the first few months of 2021 customers will be wearing face coverings.