Azerbaijan National Academy of Science

Two scientists at a German university have developed a tool which recognises a person's face in complete darkness.

The technology identifies a person from their thermal signature and matches infrared images with ordinary photos.

It uses a deep neural network system to process the pictures and recognise people in bad light or darkness.

However, the technology is not being used commercially yet, with one of its creators, Dr Saquib Sarfraz, saying: "There are no plans to roll it out."

Dr Sarfraz, who worked on the project with colleague Dr Rainer Stiefelhagen at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, told the BBC: "We have been doing research on face recognition already for several years and have a scientific interest in the problem.

"Our presented work on face recognition in thermal images is currently not used outside the research lab."

In tests, the technology had an 80% success rate, and worked 55% of the time with one image, and Dr Sarfraz said that "more training data and a more powerful architecture" could produce better results.

With a higher success rate, the tool could potentially be used by police to catch and identify criminals.

www.bbc.com