What is Retrospective Facial Recognition?
Retrospective Facial Recognition helps police identify individuals after an event by analysing images or video captured during an investigation. Officers can submit imagery to the system, which compares it against subject images held in the force’s reference gallery and returns a ranked list of potential candidates for human adjudication.
By quickly searching large volumes of imagery, the technology can help officers identify persons of interest, develop new lines of enquiry and reduce the time spent manually reviewing evidence.
It can support investigations including:
- Cold Case Identification
- Missing or Vulnerable Individuals
- Human Trafficking
- County Lines
- Wanted Individuals
- Serious Organised Crime
How can Retrospective Facial Recognition help your force?
It locates or identifies individuals against watchlists significantly faster than manual review; potentially saving weeks of investigation time that can be reallocated to working on other cases.
“Retrospective facial recognition is massively beneficial to how we work because it can identify a possible suspect much faster than manual review. We’re doing everything we can to detect crime and utilise all opportunities available to prevent re-offending, and this tool is vital for both.”
Inspector Ben Gwyer South Wales Police
Use Cases
Enhance security and efficiency with our industry leading live facial recognition technology.
Book a Personalised Demo
Discover how NEC Retrospective Facial Recognition can help your force accelerate investigations, identify individuals from images and video evidence, and uncover valuable leads that may otherwise go unnoticed. By matching images against reference galleries and returning ranked candidates for officer review, the solution supports faster, more informed investigative decision-making.
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Frequently Asked Questions
NEC’s Retrospective Facial Recognition (RFR) allows police to compare CCTV footage, mobile images, or suspect photos against secure databases to identify individuals after an incident has occurred.