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MELBOURNE - Groundbreaking facial recognition technology will be rolled out across Victoria over the next 18 months allowing police to reopen 20,000 unsolved crimes.
Police Minister Bob Cameron said the government would commit A$3.4 ($3.85) million in tomorrow's state budget so that the computer software for the program could be installed in police stations across Victoria.
Victoria Police have been trialling the system for about a year.
"This new technology puts Victoria Police as the leaders in the nation and also in the world," Mr Cameron said.
"During the pilot period, South Africa, Malaysia and the UK have been or are on their way to have a look," he said.
Mr Cameron said the system used a series of points on a person's face with various measurements -- such as a measurement from the end of their nose to their chin -- and then matched those against 610,000 images in the police database.
He said the technology could match a suspect's photo within five seconds.
Previously, victims of crime and witnesses had to manually go through books of photographs and photo-fit images.
"Matching a person's image is a time-consuming process that could take many hours or days. With this new system it takes just seconds," Mr Cameron said.
Mr Cameron said the new technology also would allow police to reopen unsolved cases.
"Victoria Police has on record more than 20,000 drawings of suspects or face files from unsolved crimes over the past 15 years," he said.
"The new technology will allow these cases to be reopened and the images run through the new system to attempt to find matches."
Senior Sergeant Kent Spry, who worked on the pilot programme, said the images on the database included people with convictions, prisoners, those who had old shooters' licences and security industry staff.
Sgt Spry said police now want to extend that database to include drivers' licence photographs from VicRoads.
He said measures had been put in place to protect people's privacy and to prevent unauthorised users hacking into the system.
"We will only be using this system within the bounds of legislation ... a driver's licence or any other image from other external organisations need to be protected, and we will do that," Sgt Spry said.
Mr Cameron said he was hopeful other states would introduce a similar system in the future.
- AAP
