Artificial intelligence could identify abusers from images of hands

SCIENTISTS WANT people to submit photographs of their hands to help develop powerful new tools to track down and convict child abusers.

They aim to create a database which will allow computers to identify individuals by the features of the back of their hand in the same way as is done with fingerprints.

Suspects have already been identified by matching features like the patterns of veins, tendons and freckles on their hands with those seen in images of abuse.

But the slow process requires close study of shocking images by scientists and police officers.

Forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black, of Lancaster University, said computer algorithms could speed up identification. She said: “A lot of the photographs we look at when it involves child abuse, it’s the back of the hand we see, not the front of the hand.

“There are so many anatomical features in there that we’ve been able to use those to help the police in the past to compare images between suspects and offenders.”

Prof Black said computer systems trawling through millions of images could find unknown links between cases and avoid officers and scientists being exposed to distressing pictures.

Prof Black said: “We are looking for about 5,000 volunteers who will take photographs of their own hands using their mobile phones and submit us those photographs.

“We will strip out all the information that will identify somebody, so we won’t be able to link that photograph back to somebody’s e-mail or name. We just want the images so that we can start to train the machines.”