National Facial Recognition Project

CrimTrac’s National Facial Recognition Project (NFRP) is investigating options for a national capability for law enforcement. It will provide police with the ability to take any facial image and compare it against the National Police Reference System (NPRS) database of facial images captured at the time of charging an individual with an offence.

The NPRS provides a ready-made data source for national facial recognition. The NPRS currently contains about three million images from all Australian police jurisdictions except Tasmania Police. Jurisdictional police services will provide images to the NPRS within the next year, completing a repository of approximately five million images in total.

The system will work by creating a template of a facial image and mathematically comparing that template against a database of other facial templates to find images of high mathematical similarity.

The advantages of a national solution are underlined by the continued success of sharing data in CrimTrac’s other biometric systems, the National Criminal Identification DNA Database (NCIDD) and the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS).

The benefits of a national facial recognition capability may include:

• more efficient identification of suspects, offenders and victims;
  
• an improved, more efficient system for witnesses assisting police;
  
• automated photo boards and witness viewing procedures;
  
• image standards and best practices to improve facial recognition identification;
  
• an improved ability to resolve ‘cold cases’ where photos of suspects are available;
  
• an improved ability to identify missing persons and unknown deceased;
  
• an increase in pleas of guilty due to confidence in identification;
  
• a reduction in crime and recidivist offending;
  
• increased usefulness and enhanced deterrent effect for public CCTV, and;
  
• an increased ability to identify fraudulent identities.

All jurisdictions have been actively engaged in determining the functional scope of the proposed national capability. Legal advice from the Australian Government Solicitor (AGS) is broadly supportive of the core aspects of the proposed project. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has been briefed on the project’s scope and intent, and will continue to be engaged throughout the course of the project. Limiting the project scope to charge images, which are already legally shared for law enforcement purposes, means that CrimTrac is unlikely to encounter any new legal or privacy issues.