Scotland Yard are using the latest facial recognition technology which was being considered for the 2012 Olympic Games to help them catch those involved in the riots on London’s streets. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that officers are feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard's newly updated face-matching program.
Scotland Yard are using the latest facial recognition technology which was being considered for the 2012 Olympic Games to help them catch those involved in the riots on London's streets. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that officers are feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard's newly updated face-matching program.
The official said that the Metropolitan Police's facial recognition software was being used to help find those suspected of being involved in the worst unrest the force has faced in a generation. On the condition of anonymity he said: "A lot of tools are being used to hunt down these criminals, and that's just one of them. The issue is that you have to have a good picture of a suspect and it is only useful if you have something to match it against. In other words, the suspect already has to have a previous criminal record."
To that end the police have released two dozen photos and videos to the picture-sharing website Flickr, where they have already gathered more than 400,000 hits. Some of those photographs have also been published by Britain's tabloid press. The photographs on Flickr are mainly grainy images pulled from closed circuit television cameras, which may not be of much use to face-matching software. But pictures taken by police surveillance teams, published in the media or snapped by passers-by could provide higher-resolution images.