This has been part of our motivation in endeavouring to improve current techniques of searching for missing people, particularly those who have been missing for some considerable time.' He said: 'Each year around 300,000 missing person cases are recorded in the UK alone. Professor Hassan Ugail, of Bradford's Centre for Visual Computing, is leading the research. The findings will be presented at the International Conference on Missing Children and Adults at Abertay University, Dundee in June, and have been published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Consequently, the method improves on existing techniques, achieving greater level of accuracy. A key feature of the method is that it teaches the machine how humans age by feeding the algorithm facial feature data from a large database of individuals at various ages.
