BERLIN, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia was "breaking new technical and legal ground nationwide" in using artificial intelligence (AI) to combat child pornography, the federal state's Minister for Justice, Peter Biesenbach, announced on Monday.

The North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Justice and central office for cybercrime (ZAC) had been working with Microsoft since April 2017 to train AI to recognize child pornography, Biesenbach said during the presentation of the first results of the project.

The proportion of manual evaluation work was very high in identifying child pornography, while the handling of child pornographic data material was subject to "very extensive legal restrictions," said justice minister Biesenbach.

"The application of artificial intelligence techniques based on cloud computing and neural networks has therefore so far been impossible," emphasized Biesenbach.

The new AI-based software developed by the German federal state's cybercrime experts in cooperation with Microsoft sifted out images relevant to criminal law from evidence.

The software could, for example, recognize the faces of perpetrators and victims, according to the North Rhine-Westphalian central office for cybercrime.

Microsoft noted that in order to comply with legal regulations, the data received a so-called "abstraction layer" before it was sent to German cybercrime experts to be evaluated.

"We have developed an abstraction software that runs locally on these servers, which enables us to abstract the images so that the human eye can no longer see anything on them," said Jan Kruse from Microsoft Germany.

"The great challenge is to evaluate data carriers in a timely manner, since the investigating authorities are not allowed to retain evidence for a disproportionately long time," said the head of the ZAC NRW, Senior Public Prosecutor Markus Hartmann.

"Otherwise, there is a risk that evidence will have to be handed out before it can be established with certainty whether child pornography material is contained on them"

In child pornography cases, investigators often seized numerous different electronic storage media, such as laptops, hard drives or mobile phones, on which millions of files could be stored.

According to North Rhine-Westphalia's staff unit against child pornography, however, on average a clerk could only view 500 pictures per hour.

Herbert Reul (CDU), the Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, recently said that the authorities could not "cope with the huge amount of data".

In mid-June, only 12 percent of around 1,900 cases pending on suspicion of child abuse or child pornography in the German federal state were being evaluated, according to Reul.

The police in North Rhine-Westphalia currently only had 104 expert positions in the field of child pornography crimes, according to the German federal state's interior minister.

All district police authorities in the German federal state needed to reschedule and at least double their personnel for this task, according to interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Reul. Enditem

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