The Home Office is offering £500,000 to allow organisations to test out potential innovative technologies that can identify people carrying, overtly or covertly, steel-bladed knives in public open spaces.
It is looking for detection methods that can screen freely moving people in an "unobtrusive and potentially covert" way, both indoors and outdoors as well as in crowds.
The Home Office has not given specific examples of the kinds of technologies it is interested in, but ideas in various stages of development elsewhere in the world include remote-controlled drones that can detect metal while flying overhead.
Meanwhile, computer algorithms that scan CCTV images in real time to spot knives have also been mooted. And trials of high-speed body scanners powered by artificial intelligence that can check up to 800 people an hour without anyone having to remove their keys, coins or mobile phone, have previously taken place in the US.
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