Unlocking the Past: The Power of Retrospective Facial Recognition
Retrospective Facial Recognition (RFR) is the application of facial recognition technology after an event or incident has occurred. It plays a crucial role in criminal investigations by helping to identify suspects from images or video footage. In comparison to its stable-mate, Live Facial Recognition (LFR), RFR is more suited for detailed, post-event analysis, while LFR is designed for immediate identification and response in dynamic environments.
Here’s how it works:
- Image Collection: Images are gathered from various sources such as CCTV, mobile phones, dashcams, doorbell cameras, or social media.
- Comparison: These images are then compared against a database of known individuals, typically those who have been arrested.
- Verification: When a potential match is found, a trained operator reviews the images to confirm the match. An investigating officer also reviews the match to ensure accuracy.
- Investigation: The identified individual is then investigated further, considering all available evidence.
RFR is a powerful tool for law enforcement that identifies individuals post event from images or videos by submitting an image or a video into the system. It is matched against all subject images in your reference image gallery where a set of ranked candidates are returned to an officer for human adjudication.
Using retrospective facial recognition can save your force significant time and resources in the following investigations:
- Cold Case Identification
- Missing or vulnerable individuals
- Human Trafficking
- County Lines
- Wanted Individuals
- Serious organised crime
A South Wales Police study found that without RFR identifications take around fourteen days, whereas with it they typically take minutes.
About NeoFace Watch
NeoFace Watch is NEC’s high performance, highly scalable facial recognition solution, providing fast and accurate results for the most demanding real-time or post-event facial recognition use cases.
The NeoFace algorithm is ranked as highly accurate by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory and ranked as #1 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
It’s designed to find a needle in a haystack, reducing a problem down to a much smaller review process. Built upon 40 years’ experience and world leading AI, it’s highly tolerant of ageing, angles, headwear and environmental factors such as lighting.
It performs consistently regardless of age, ethnicity and gender by combining the best feature-matching and AI technologies. Underpinned with built-in safeguards to protect privacy and ensure proportionate use, NeoFace Watch has GDPR-compliant audit records & reports and easy to use data-retention tools.
Find out more about our Retrospective Facial Recognition software.
