Face recognition software called "Mandrake" has already been tested for real in Newham high street in London. The high street has 140 street cameras. The images from the cameras are fed to the system. It can match faces from the CCTV to a database of known offenders. If it finds a match, it alerts a human operator, showing them the person on the CCTV image, and a list of possible matches from the database.
If the human operator agrees that the person is the same, they may want to contact the police.
This kind of technology is rather controversial. Whilst the manufacturers focus on its 80% success rate, civil liberty groups like Liberty point out this means 1 in 5 of the people identified are entirely innocent.
(Thanks to staff at Leeds University School of Computing for having a sense of humour!)
