CINCINNATI (WKRC) - Within minutes, software at the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office matches a new picture of Nino Dailey with older mugshots.

It's all thanks to a facial recognition program. Workers say the department was the first in Ohio to have the technology.

Edward Zievernick is the record section supervisor in the office's Identification Unit.

"It'll find points of distance between like a nose and an earlobe, a chin and the nose or a forehead spot," he said. "The points that they find are all mathematically figured out in an algorithms that will then do the exact same search in the computer program on our database of criminal photos."

Sixteen analysts and four supervisors received training, including from the FBI. They can even generate an image off of a still from surveillance video or a profile of someone's face.

Zievernick said, "If a face is turned, we can create a 3D image of that face with part of this product."

This system led to Dailey's arrest.

Cincinnati Police officer Frank Palmisano was investigating a robbery where a suspect used social media to lure and rob a man in Winton Terrace.

"My victim still had the Facebook and everything that Mr. Dailey was using. It was under a slightly different name. So we couldn't get his real name through that way," Palmisano said. "So that's what we did. We were able to copy and paste it into there and then the facial recognition hit to Mr. Dailey."

Since January, Palmisano has arrested roughly six suspects with help from the software. Investigators use photo lineups to ensure that the right suspect is identified.

"From the time that we get assigned the case until the time we either can't develop a suspect or we develop a suspect until that suspect's arrested, we're constantly working on that ," he said.

The sheriff's analysts help any law enforcement agency that asks.

"What this does is put another tool in the investigator's belt, so to speak, so that they can go and do what they always do, which is an investigation, but now we give them a direction to go into," Zievernick said.

The Sheriff's Office only uses mugshots in its system to match suspects. The analysts do not pull from public pictures or random photos on the internet.

They've had the software for almost a year. Analysts helped make several arrests in the first few months.

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