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Police anti-child abuse task force investigators often have to sift through millions of seized photos and videos in their effort to crack child porn rings.

The process, when done manually, is hugely time consuming and "devastating to one's soul," as one veteran anti-child abuse expert puts it.

But now the Winnipeg Police Service's Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit has found a way to automate the process, saving investigators a colossal amount of time – and heartache – in the bargain.

The force is the first Canadian police department to use "image matching" software to fight online trafficking in child porn.

Dubbed LACE (or Law Enforcement for Child Exploitation) the software tool drastically cuts down the time investigators need to spend analyzing seized images. It does this by automatically weeding out photos and videos already present in the station's database.

LACE has been developed by BlueBear Law Enforcement Services Inc., a software company in Gatineau, Que.

As previously logged images account for 74 to 90 per cent of confiscated abuse material, the tool can shave off investigation time by three quarters, and shorten the time officers spend watching horrendous images from weeks or months to hours and days.

The program – initially deployed on trial basis by the ICE unit in July of 2007 – first scans images for descriptive elements, such as pixel counts, colour, brightness, size and other patterns. It then analyzes the images based on these parameters, categories them and determines matches to eliminate duplicates.

"This means if a photo is already in our database, I won't need to look at it again even if it's part of recently seized batch that I'm investigating," said Det. Sgt. Rich Lamire of the ICE Unit.

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