Hessen Police's system compares the biometric facial characteristics of a specifically wanted person against people appearing in designated video-protection zones, in order to locate that person, a missing person, or a victim in defined circumstances. Non-matches are stated to be deleted immediately, and any match is reviewed by police personnel rather than acted on automatically.

What distinguishes this from the general live facial recognition entry on this site is the legal mechanism and the scope of the search. Live facial recognition as typically deployed (for example by the Metropolitan Police or South Wales Police) continuously scans everyone passing a camera against a standing watchlist of many people. Hessen's system, as described in the source reviewed, is authorised under Paragraph 14 of the Hesse Law on Public Safety and Order (HSOG) with a judicial authorisation requirement before deployment, and is framed around locating one specific, named individual rather than continuously screening a crowd against a list. That is a materially different proportionality and oversight model, even though the underlying facial-matching technique is the same family of technology.

This is Germany's first entry on this site's tracker. The vendor supplying the underlying facial recognition model was not specified in the source reviewed.