The system will identify and match hundreds of thousands of child abuse images located on suspects' hard drives and stored in the Australian National Victim Image Library (ANVIL), and tie them to solved and cold cases.

Government technology agency Crimtrac estimates 20,000 new child exploitation images appear on the Internet each week through some 100,000 websites, paid portals and peer-to-peer sites. About 100,000 of the 500,000 images estimated to be in circulation are original.

State police agencies have no way of knowing if a seized image is original, or is part of a solved, open or cold case in another state.

Queensland Detective Senior Sergeant, Wayne Steinhart, said the system will image-match to determine if a suspect has duplicate images, or is involved in new acts of child abuse.

"Detectives spend hundreds of hours sifting through child abuse images to discover child exploitation on an offenders' computer -- it could be 100,000 images which is overwhelming, but our role is to identify victims," Stienhart said.