Police to pioneer face recognition system

The Citizen
Posted :2007-05-02

 IT'S like something out of James Bond - but Lancashire police are among the first forces in the country to use pioneering facial recognition technology.

Police are piloting a scheme that takes high-tech images of suspects and stores them on a national database.

It is hoped the project will help identify suspects who use aliases to commit crime.

And in the future the images will be used to automatically identify suspects captured on CCTV footage.

The force has been trialling Facial Images National Database (FIND) alongside Merseyside and West Yorkshire.

Every police station in the county with a custody suite has the automatic facial recognition software fitted into a specialist photo booth.

It works by measuring the parameters of a suspect's face, recording the distances between eyes, ears and nose, as well as any other distinguishing figures.

John Harwood, Lancashire Police head of fingerprinting, said: "Some forces are still using wet film to take pictures and develop prints.

"In Lancashire we have an electronic capture system.

"We need to be able to bring all the pictures together in a fast, accurate and efficient way rather than relying on post or on email which can be time consuming.

"The aim is to bring all the images together on a national collection.

"It's another tool in the armoury of the police to try and take the whole ID process further but in the long run the objective is to make the county a safer place as a whole."

Video images are taken to achieve best quality pictures which meet with national standards.

The project, called VideoWitness2000 in Lancashire, will run for a further four months then be evaluated.

Mr Harwood added: "If this pilot is effective we would expect to see within 18 months to two years it move on to bigger things."