It wasn't long ago that Vanessa Stein was out and about in the Mainz market square.

In front of her are two men, 1.80 meters tall, short hair, dark blond.

Rather inconspicuous.

And before either of them turns and Vanessa Stein can see his face, she knows that she has seen this man before.

"Seven years ago, when there was a disturbance." Vanessa Stein experiences moments like this almost every day.

Only she could never say why.

She has known for a year that she has a certain talent that her mother probably also had.

That's why it always seemed "normal" to her, as she puts it.

She is among the 2 percent of people in the population who can memorize and recall faces, or even just fragments of faces, down to the smallest detail.

Catherine Iskandar

Responsible editor for the "Rhein-Main" department of the Sunday newspaper.

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A year ago, the police headquarters began to look for officers with this talent in their own ranks - and found them.

44 were selected from around a thousand applicants.

In a complex test procedure developed by the University of Greenwich, the extent of their abilities was repeatedly put to the test.

They were shown pictures of wanted criminals, which they later had to find among thousands of entries in huge image databases.

Hair swirls play a role, a small notch in the chin, the forehead.

For Vanessa Stein and her colleagues "not difficult", as she says.

"Super recognizers" like Vanessa Stein only need about ten to 15 minutes to scan around 2000 images for identical people - even if the image material comes from very different years and situations, if the images were taken from different angles.

Programs with facial recognition software are not faster, says Carina Lerch from the Operations department of the Frankfurt Presidium, who heads the "Super Recogniser" project.

"What's more, the officials are even more precise."

131 people identified in the Dannenröder forest

because the people were often represented twice or three times on the comprehensive image material.

Finally, 131 people remained, who could finally be identified by the "Super Recognizer".

Among the 400 cases in which it has been possible to find wanted people in databases since May 2021 was the man who attacked passers-by with a knife at Frankfurt Central Station at the end of October last year.

Vanessa Stein tracked him down.

There was a video recording of the fact.

She estimated the age and based it roughly on the appearance.

Then she went through thousands upon thousands of entries until she thought she had found the alleged perpetrator.

As it turned out, it was indeed the man.

The "Super Recognisers" had another success with another suspect, a serial offender who was considered for numerous cases of pickpocketing, trickery and computer fraud.

After he could be identified, at least 19 crimes in Hesse alone were attributed to him.

"There's a lot of potential there"

The Frankfurt police chief Gerhard Bereswill had hoped that the model he knew from Munich could also be a success in Frankfurt.

But he didn't think the possible uses were so diverse, he said.

He sees advantages above all in the evaluation of images received via the city's video surveillance systems, for example in the case of manhunts.

"There's still a lot of potential there."

times from the side.

The Greenwich University test works on the same principle.

Incidentally, Memory is one of Vanessa Stein's favorite games.

What else?