Bluebear is a small software firm in Gatineau making big waves in policing. They've developed a program that does rapid analysis of the victim's faces. It speeds up investigations dramatically.
Cases of child abuse often take months to investigate because the law demands an investigator look at every image seized and then record whether or not it depicts abuse.
When there are hundreds of thousands of images it's slow work. The program, called Law Enforcement Against Child Abuse (LACE), does the analysis automatically.
"We have a 90 to 95 per cent success rate versus other systems that identify 5 to 10 per cent," company CEO Normand Antoine says.
The program generates a printed report that gives a breakout of all photo content. The analysis and report are accepted by the courts.
"The program looks at images just like a human and analyses the visual content just like a human brain," Normand says.
The program can isolate faces that appear in multiple images.
Software engineer Anthony Lau developed the program. "What I am doing makes me happy," he says. "I know how the software is being used and when they say something nice about the software it's great."
Still to come is video analysis and recognizing not just faces but objects in a photo, he says.
Normand says they've made the decision to apply this software just to this kind of crime.
"More criminal organizations are getting involved," he adds. "It's no longer just those who are perverted but those who are willing to exploit children and make tons of money."
Gatineau police use the program, and Ottawa police have agreed to test it. Other clients include two U.S. national police agencies, several European agencies and the Quebec Provincial police.
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