The police force is using a new computer system that compares digital photos of suspects with photos of 80,000 people who are ‘known to the police’, contained in the database of the photo confrontation module. Within a few seconds, the system displays the individuals who most closely resemble the suspect. The system will deliver considerable time savings to detectives and provides them with a direction for further investigation. ICT service provider, Logica, realised the system following a successful trial period with the police force. 

A detective, wishing to find out whether an unknown suspect has previously been registered by the force, e-mails digital images of the suspect’s face to the face recognition team. Images may originate, for example, from a security camera or a falsified identity card. The system analyses the photo and produces a list of individuals who bear the strongest resemblance. The search result can be refined afterwards by adding biographic information like the height, age and sex of the suspect. The team subsequently makes a case for the result and reports back to the detective. The method is similar to that by which an unknown fingerprint is compared against a collection of known fingerprints.   
 
The system, which uses the Cognitec face recognition algorithm, registers the distance between and proportions of facial features such as eyes, nose and corners of the mouth.

Logica has previously carried out successful trials concerning facial recognition in the Netherlands of football hooligans in the Philips Stadium in Eindhoven and shoplifters in the Rotterdam shopping centre, Zuidplein.