The Northern Territory Police Force is using facial recognition technology to identify criminals through a database of photos and match them against any image or CCTV footage.
The NEC NeoFace Reveal system can also identify photos taken from body-worn camera videos, drones and phone images.
During the trial earlier this year, police used the system to identify approximately 300 people from photos and CCTV footage.
The NT government has announced it will move to a second phase that broadens the technology's applications in crime fighting.
There are currently 190 cameras in the network monitored by the police department’s CCTV unit along with recently deployed mobile CCTV units that can be moved on-demand to ‘hot spots’ and major public events.
The government has also issued 1330 iPads to police officers and installed satellite communications in 51 police vehicles in remote locations.
Footage or images captured on CCTV footage are submitted to NT Police’s facial recognition team who can load it into the facial recognition system for analysis and comparison with existing images in the database.
So far, 100,000 images have been copied into the database.
The software has helped the NT Police identify more than 300 people including a man who stole goods from Casuarina Village, identified by CCTV footage, and a man who unlawfully entered Charles Darwin University, identified from a still image obtained by security.
The system allows police to search through their database of photos and match against any image or CCTV footage, as well as photos taken from body-worn camera videos, drones and phone images.
According to the police, the advantage of face recognition over fingerprint identification is that face images can be captured from a distance without touching the person being identified.
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