NEC Australia has won a $780,000 contract to roll out facial recognition software for SA Police.
The technology, based on NEC’s NeoFace software, was rolled out in the Northern Territory last year.
The software will allow SA Police to match “search, scan and monitor images and video of suspects against offender databases,” a statement issued by the South Australian government said.
“The facial recognition technology can also enhance South Australia’s existing CCTV network in the future by extracting faces in real time and instantaneously matching them against a watch list of individuals. The technology will also be used in missing person cases.”
The rollout will be complete by late October. NEC Australia’s Melbourne-based R&D team is working with SA Police to develop applications that leverage the system.
“Technology has an increasingly vital role in policing, and as technology evolves into the future, so too will the way our police force operates,” SA police minister Peter Malinauskas said.
NEC Australia earlier this year won a CrimTrac contract to deliver a new multi-modal biometric identification system as a successor to the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS). (CrimTrac has since merged with the Australian Crime Commission to create the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission).