The system can identify an individual from video footage recorded under extremely poor conditions and low resolution.

National ICT Australia (NICTA) Advanced Surveillance project manager, Brian Lovell, said about one person a week in Queensland and two in Sydney will seek asylum in Australia through airports, often by boarding a plane using fake documentation and destroying the papers once they land, making it impossible to determine on which flight they had arrived.

"There is no way of knowing what flight they had come in on," Lovell said, adding each asylum seeker costs the Federal Government about $100,000.

"The system takes a photo, just one still frame, of an individual [as they leave the plane] and match them up when they come through Customs which will make the carriers responsible for returning them under the IATA agreement," Lovell said at CeBIT 2010.

"It returns a shortlist of possible matches that means officers can look through maybe 50 faces instead of hundreds."